If “piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission- if “if value, then right” is true- then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of “big media” today- film, records, radio, and cable TV-was born of a kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how last generation’s pirates join this generation’s country club-until now.

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About Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig (born 3 June 1961) is an American academic and political activist. He is most famous as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications. He is a director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Prior to rejoining Harvard, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons, a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center, an advisory board member of the Sunlight Foundation and a former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Biography information from Wikiquote

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Additional quotes by Lawrence Lessig

"A "guerra" que foi levantada contra as tecnologias da Internei o que o presidente da Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)6 Jack Valenti chamou de "sua própria Guerra Contra o Terror" [13] foi forjada como uma batalha pelo direito legal de respeito à propriedade. Para saber que lado assumir nessa guerra, muitos pensam que precisamos decidir apenas se somos a favor ou não da propriedade privada.
Se essas fossem as verdadeiras escolhas, então eu provavelmente estaria do lado de Jack Valenti e da indústria do conteúdo. Eu também acredito no direito à propriedade privada, e especialmente na importância ao que o Sr. Valenti carinhosamente chama de "propriedade criativa". Eu acredito que a "pirataria" é errada, e que a lei, propriamente ajustada, deveria punir a "pirataria", seja ela dentro ou fora da Internet.
Mas tais crenças simplistas mascaram uma questão ainda mais fundamental e uma mudança ainda mais dramática. Meu medo é que, a não ser que percebamos essa mudança, a guerra para livrar o mundo dos "piratas da Internei" irá também livrar nossa cultura de valores que são fundamentais à nossa tradição desde seu início."

But it is to say that a basic idea of a representative democracy — one that argues over fundamental choices of policy, through the battle between differently committed representatives — is not the reality of our democracy anymore. We’ve settled into what Francis Fukuyama calls a “vetocracy,” where change of almost any kind, whether from the Right or the Left, is practically always stopped.