Copyright Quotes

“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

“A tap is a zero-length swipe.”
― Apple Inc.

“Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“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

“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

“If “piracy” means using value from someone else’s creative property without permission from that creator–as it is increasingly described today – then every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV… Extremists in this debate love to say “You wouldn’t go into Barnes & Noble and take a book off of the shelf without paying; why should it be any different with online music?” The difference is, of course, that when you take a book from Barnes & Noble, it has one less book to sell. By contrast, when you take an MP3 from a computer network, there is not one less CD that can be sold. The physics of piracy of the intangible are different from the physics of piracy of the tangible.”
― Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

“Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the “Innovator’s Dilemma”: the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer.”
― Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

“Every time I go past a cinema and see a queue out the door, I think, look at those fools, every penny they spend is turned into profits that are used to pass laws imprisoning their own children. Can't they see?”
― Cory Doctorow, Pirate Cinema

“You can steal someone's work but you can't steal the experience that he has gained from that work.”
― Rumman Bin Sadiq

“The obvious point of Conrad’s cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: No one ever died from copyright circumvention. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do.”
― Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

“I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you’re out, mate.”
― Cory Doctorow, Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century

“My life is too short to focus on legislation when I could be making art. So I'm not a copyright reformer, I'm a copyright abolitionist.”
― Nina Paley

“Posthumous retention of copyright is really a gangrenous foot-in-the-door for the coming zombie apocalypse. And who in tarnation really wants that?”
― Pansy Schneider-Horst

“Technically, you cannot really own a book you bought; you can only own the sheets of paper your copy is printed on; unless, of course, you are the book’s publisher.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Selfish Genie: A Satirical Essay on Altruism

“I'm not a lawyer, but I play one in my novel COPYRIGHT. I also play a serial rapist, a drug addict, a teenage boy and lesbian model.”
― Lori Lesko

“There is a Pirate in every one of us.”
― Dr. Kalyan C. Kankanala

“Piracy of Bollywood; or Bollywood of Piracy, Tough to Say.”
― Dr. Kalyan C. Kankanala

“Satan plagiarized by dictator, and he doesn’t even have copyright! (Satan plagié par dictateur, - Et il n’a même pas de droits d’auteur!)”
― Charles de Leusse

“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

“We can instantly map the usage of the word 'raven' across the United States, in works of narrative poetry, written by men in their thirties. but only up to 1923. When it comes to the last century, save if new law affords entry, then the lawyer - dark-robed sentry - who is ever at our door, will yet whisper, "Nevermore!”
― Erez Aiden, Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture