Lawrence Lessig Quote

That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of free culture—not free as in free beer (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement[2] ), but free as in free speech, free markets, free trade, free enterprise, free will, and free elections. A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a permission culture—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

Lawrence Lessig

That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of free culture—not free as in free beer (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement[2] ), but free as in free speech, free markets, free trade, free enterprise, free will, and free elections. A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a permission culture—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

Related Quotes

About Lawrence Lessig

Lester Lawrence "Larry" Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and of Equal Citizens. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.