Jonathan Zittrain Quotes (13 Quotes)

There are some conversations that are undeniably improved when the rule going in is that you have to stand behind what you say and have to wear a name tag when you do it. But that's certainly not all conversations. People might be prepared to ethically stand behind what they say, but might be in a position that they can't afford to lose their house over it. Speech shouldn't just be for people with lawyers.

You can already see the privacy debate moving to the realm of automated massive data mining. When governments begin to suspect people because of where they were at a certain time, it can get very worrying.

You can't give away your vote for something of value, but because there is no material gain, it's not ... clearly in violation of federal law.

Congress was willing to set guard dogs -- paid by the government -- around anything that private industry could come up with to protect works even if those protections were excessive.

To me, Congress would have been wise to say 'If you build a system that approximates the balance of rights with copyright itself, we'll protect it. If you go overboard, you are on your own,' ... It would have been a harder act to create because it would have had a gray zone ... but that's what we pay legislators to do -- to write subtle legislation.

The law basically says that if you crack a system meant to protect a copyright work, you go to jail if you produce software for the purpose of cracking anti-circumvention measures, you go to jail.

I think this is a very ripe time to take on some of the hardest questions. It's not a crazy position to say that these companies should not be there at all - but that's not my view, and I think there are ways to begin drawing lines so that there are ways that the companies can make the world better by being there.

The realization that every digital movement is recorded and monitored itself will chill private behavior.

The power and promise of the Internet is that anyone can write and distribute code for tens of millions of others to adopt and run. The downside of this is that bad code can too readily get onto the public's PCs. Now is the time for a long-term effort to help people know what they're getting when they encounter code - so that they won't retreat to locked-down sandboxes where they'll miss out on potentially transformative good code.

Another view is Western companies chartered in societies that believe in this kind of censorship shouldn't be carrying water for societies that do.

So there's one set of countries, anchored by Iran, Cuba and China, that would like to see some process by which governments of the world have a much larger hand in controlling the shape of the internet.

This is a mockery of our laws. It's a complete joke. The fact that Congress solemnly inserted this provision that will be used over the next 25 years exactly zero times ... makes me embarrassed to say that I am a law professor in the U.S.

There has been a misconception -- and a helpful one -- among many government bureaucrats that the Internet is a non-geographic phenomenon. But it can be reworked to correspond to national jurisdictions and boundaries.