Lawrence Lessig

"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."

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

"A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom."

"Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device."

"When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place."

"Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology."

"[I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments."

"So, ignorant we are. But we're not stupid. Indeed...remaining ignorant about politics and our government is a perfectly rational response to the government we have. The question isn't what we know. The question is what we're capable of knowing, and doing, if we have the right incentives, and the right opportunity."