Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.
Always make new mistakes.
Owning the intellectual property is like owning land: You need to keep investing in it again and again to get a payoff; you can't simply sit back and collect rent.
The best investor is your customer.
When I was a young student, I thought grow-ups would come and make things work. Now I realize that grown-ups are just kids with wrinkles.
I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.
Dyson's Law: Do ask; don't lie.
The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.
Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.
It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.
As an investor in small companies, I don't care how rich Microsoft is. I care about what my opportunities are.
But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.
The inner sort of consumer identity got the best of people. And everybody just wants things for free. And that's created this strange kind of cheapness to everything, where everything becomes throwaway. And people, I think, have started to undervalue things, maybe because there's too much, maybe because it's too easy to make, but I think mostly just because, somehow, that's the pattern that got set. And I think that's regrettable.
As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.
No system in the world is so well-designed that it can't grow stale, rigid, or corrupted by those who benefit most from it.
Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
I believe in markets doing what they do well, which is to develop technology, and letting citizens do what they ideally do well, which is to set policy.
I am not in favor of immortality. I believe death for humans is the way of getting rid of accumulated errors - as in trial and error. Without death, the old folks would start to gang up on the babies (the new trials). Immortality --> immortal mistakes.
I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.
The definition of the problem, rather than its solution, will be the scarce resource in the future.
We invented our computers in the '80s. We networked them together in the '90s. Now we're giving them eyes, ears and sensory organs. And we're asking them to observe and manipulate the world on our behalf.
People need to understand that the technology is for them. It's not to them. It's not over them. People still sometimes want to be led a little too much.
I became a real free market fanatic. I'm probably less so now than even two or three years ago.
What's really going on here is, this is a media shift. It's comparable to what happened in the 1950s and the birth of electronic mass media back then.This is the birth of a new kind of personal media, where, instead of we're all watching one program, we're all watching each other. And the history of media makes it really clear. Whenever we have a big innovation, the first wave of stuff we do is pretty crummy. The printing press gave us pornography, cheap thrillers, and how-to books. Television gave us Newt Minow's vast wasteland.
I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information.
