«Intellectual Property»

Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.

Craig Venter

People recognize intellectual property the same way they recognize real estate. People understand what property is. But it’s a new kind of property, and so the understanding uses new control surfaces. It uses a new way of defining the property.

Michael Nesmith

A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling “Thief.”

If he is wise he has not been impoverished.

Nor has the fool been enriched.

The thief flatters us by stealing.

We flatter him by complaining.

Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century

Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

Tim Berners-Lee

I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It’s a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others.

John Perry Barlow

No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

Mark Helprin

If a man is keeping an idea to himself, and that idea is taken by stealth or trickery-I say it is stealing. But once a man has revealed his idea to others, it is no longer his alone. It belongs to the world.

Linda Sue Park, A Single Shard

Next time you open the paper, and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decision, it’s not about something small and technical. It is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other, and the way information, knowledge and culture will be produced.

Yochai Benkler

In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.

Mitch Kapor

If Patents are for Patients, Then Patients will be for Patents.

Kalyan C. Kankanala

Piracy begins where creativity ends.

Kalyan C. Kankanala

While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.

Rebecca MacKinnon

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.

Lawrence Lessig

The Internet has been a blessing and a curse. The curse we know: A lot of people appropriating your intellectual property without paying for it. But I think it’s important to realize the blessing of the Internet, which is that everybody has a voice and you can break through, even without a record company.

Gloria Estefan

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

Bill Gates

I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.

Linus Torvalds

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.

Eric Allman

Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can’t tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.

Michael Montoure, Slices