Lawrence Lessig Technology Quotations

don't really want the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the content owners ought to lose.

Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.

But it is as silly to think about peer-to-peer as applying just to music as it would have been to think about the Internet as applying just to pornography. Whatever the initial use of the technology, it has nothing to do with the potential of the architecture to serve many other extremely important functions.

Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.

Why should it be that just when technology is most encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive?

Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.