Lawrence Lessig

Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The “taken for granted” is the test of sanity; “what everyone knows” is the line between us and them.

The film Twelve Monkeys was stopped by a court twenty-eight days after its release because an artist claimed a chair in the movie resembled a sketch of a piece of furniture that he had designed. The movie Batman Forever was threatened because the Batmobile drove through an allegedly copyrighted courtyard and the original architect demanded money before the film could be released. In 1998, a judge stopped the release of The Devil's Advocate for two days because a sculptor claimed his art was used in the background.2

believed the bias would favor freedom.

source of that creativity and innovation, and then protect that source, the Internet will be changed.

this is the winter of the Internet's life. The question for us is whether the spring will be as silent.

Through our work as colleagues, and on the Microsoft case as well, Jonathan Zittrain helped me see how platforms matter.

But what about the stuff that appears in the film incidentally? Posters on a wall in a dorm room, a can of Coke held by the “cigarette smoking man,” an advertisement on a truck in the background? These too are creative works.

But others inspire more through their simple and quiet perseverance.

In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt.

THERE ARE two futures in front of us, the one we are taking and the one we could have. The one we are taking is easy to describe. Take the Net, mix it with the fanciest TV, add a simple way to buy things, and that's pretty much it. It is a future much like the present. Though I don't (yet) believe this view of America Online (AOL), it is the most cynical image of Time Warner's marriage to AOL: the forging of an