We have to recognize that they (our kids) are different from us. We made mix tapes. They remix music. We watched TV, they make TV. It is technology that has made them different. And as we see what this technology can do we need to recognize that you can’t kill the instinct the technology produces, you can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids “passive” again, we can only make them “pirates.” Is that good?
We live in a weird time, it is a kind of age of prohibitions where in many areas of our life we live our life against the law. Ordinary people, living life against the law. And that’s what we are doing to our kids. They live their life, knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting, and in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better.
Lawrence Lessig at TED, March 2007 discussing the ways in which the law is strangling creativity.
