«Copyright»

The copyright bargain: a balance between protection for the artist and rights for the consumer.

Robin Gross

A brainy person does not abuse copyright; instead they respect it and uphold it.

Maximillian Degenerez

Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

Lawrence Lessig

I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text.

Richard Curtis

Actually, attorneys say, copying a purchased CD for even one friend violates the federal copyright code most of the time.

Charles Duhigg

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a gift to the well-financed entertainment and software industries, trashed the public interest. It gave copyright owners the right to assert absolute control over copyrighted material, effectively allowing them to prevent the public from asserting a variety of traditional user’s rights, including the ‘fair use’ of making personal copies.

Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News

The problem with copyright enforcement is that when the parameters aren’t incredibly well defined, it means big corporations, who have deeper pockets and better lawyers, can bully people.

Shepard Fairey

Earlier generations of technology . . . have presented challenges to existing copyright law, but none have posed the same threat as the digital age.

John V. Pavlik,

New Media Technology, 1996

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

Northrop Frye

This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth.

Lawrence Lessig

Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

United Nations,

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I have always found it interesting... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery.

Tom Lehrer

Don’t copy, get inspired.

Bangambiki Habyarimana,

The Great Pearl of Wisdom

If you create something, you don’t want someone else to go and profit from it; you have your right to make a living and everything. So I respect copyright. What I don’t respect is copyright extremism. And what I don’t respect is a business model that encourages piracy.

Kim Dotcom

I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works - I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.

Esther Dyson

I’m a bit cynical that it ever will be addressed properly. I think it is healthy to get some sort of copyright protection. But some of it has gone on forever.

Peter Gabriel

If a creative person steals your idea, he’s killing his creative ability, if he steals your art, he’s killing his art, if he makes it available to the world, it won,t create de impact you could have created, because it wasn’t from the right source.

Michael Bassey Johnson

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

David Bowie

In making policy designed with copyright in mind, you end up making decisions about whether other important technologies, such as privacy-enhancing or file-search technologies, should be encouraged or discouraged. A collision is happening between creativity and protecting IP.

Edward Felten

In practice, the copyright system does a bad job of supporting authors, aside from the most popular ones. Other authors’ principal interest is to be better known, so sharing their work benefits them as well as readers.

Richard Stallman

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn’t give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

Nathan Myhrvold

You look at this and you say this is insane. It’s insane. And if it is only Hollywood that has to deal with this, OK, that’s fine. Let them be insane. The problem is their insane rules are now being applied to the whole world. This insanity of control is expanding as everything you do touches copyrights.

Lawrence Lessig, "Free Culture"

There is no sense in owning the copyright unless you are going to use it. I don’t think anyone wants to hold all of this stuff in a vault and not let anybody have it. It’s only worth something once it’s popular.

Hilary Rosen

As we’ve seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture.

Lawrence Lessig

We’re on the path of creating monopoly business practices out of copyright law.

Robin Gross

The rights of copyright holders need to be protected, but some draconian remedies that have been suggested would create more problems than they would solve.

Patrick Leahy

…my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.

Cory Doctorow, Makers

I think copyright has its right to exist, absolutely, and I think that it’s up to copyright creators to come up with new solutions that deal with the reality of the world we’re living in today.

Kim Dotcom

Once again, content owners have successfully promoted their own narrow financial interests over the broader public interest in preserving consumer access to literary, scientific, and other works.

Prof. Peter Jaszi,

American University’s Washington College of Law

To promote public education and creative exchange, [copyright law] invites audiences and subsequent authors to use existing works in every conceivable manner that falls outside the province of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights. Copyright law’s perennial dilemma is to determine where exclusive rights should end and unrestrained public access should begin.

Neil Weinstock Netanel

Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The First Circle

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.

Esther Dyson

I’m not a big believer in our copyright laws; I find them way too restrictive.

Michael Moore

Copyright law is totally out of date. It is a Gutenberg artifact. Since it is a reactive process, it will probably have to break down completely before it is corrected.

Nicholas Negroponte,

Being Digital, 1995

You will only have copyright in a society that places a very high value on the individual, the individual intellect, the products of individual intellect.

Tim Parks, Where I’m Reading From:

The Changing World of Books

All over the world copyright holders are trying to limit consumers’ rights. We cannot have that.

Jon Johansen

If I’m seeing you, you’re going to influence me. I’m sorry - I’m just that way. I’m a big sponge. You can’t copyright an aesthetic.

Douglas Carter Beane

You can steal someone’s work but you can’t steal the experience that he has gained from that work.

Rumman Bin Sadiq