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

“the whole world is best managed when divided among private owners,”

Shapiro saw good and bad in both futures. Too much dis-intermediation, he warned, would interfere with collective governance; some balance was needed.

The first was the familiar story of increased individual freedom, as the network gave us greater control over our lives,

The second was a less familiar warning—of the rebirth of technologies of control, as institutions “disintermediated”

I don't mean the control of George Orwell's 1984. The struggle that I describe here is not between free speech and censorship, or between democracy and totalitarianism.

This is the freedom that fueled the greatest technological revolution that our culture

the result of these two changes together will be an environment of innovation fundamentally different from what it was, or promised to be.

t from what it was, or promised to be.
Or so it will be unless we do something now.