Science & Tech Quote by Lawrence Lessig

Lessig is doing something sly here: he frames a humble civic act - a library mounting a New Deal web exhibit - as the canary in the coal mine for a copyright regime that has quietly inverted its original purpose. The image is strategically unglamorous. Not Hollywood, not Silicon Valley, not some villainous pirate site. A library. That choice is the point: when even the institutions we trust to preserve public memory need legal triage to tell a story with pictures and sound, the system has stopped “incentivizing” creativity and started taxing it.

The sharpest move is his emphasis on “no formalities.” He’s referring to the modern reality that copyright attaches automatically, without registration or notice, and lasts a very long time. That means the default status of culture is “owned,” even when the owner is unfindable, indifferent, or dead. Lessig’s subtext is that this isn’t merely bureaucratic friction; it’s structural censorship-by-transaction-cost. The law doesn’t have to forbid the exhibit. It just has to make it expensive, risky, and slow enough that the exhibit never happens.

The New Deal reference tightens the critique. This is archival, documentary culture - the kind that relies on quotations, fragments, and recontextualization to explain how a society got here. Lessig is arguing that the digital age didn’t create a new wave of theft; it exposed how a formalities-free copyright system turns routine acts of education into legal negotiations, and in doing so, makes the past harder to access, remix, and understand.