Patricia Highsmith Quotes

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid.

People have to respect intellectual property.

A lot of artists are much more concerned about how their work is used and how it's disseminated. That, to artists, is as important as the money, for some people.

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 I what I don't respect is a business model that encourages piracy.

Well, I think that it is complicated in that the first four albums were all with Universal so they have the rights to that and therefore it is a lot easier for them to do that period.

If we're talking about someone creating something new, those rights are fairly well defined (in the United States, at least) under existing copyright law. But then there's often discussion about the rights of people who produce works under work-for-hire arrangements, which can be far more subtle and nuanced.

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.

The funny thing in France is that writers are not allowed to retire, because the French government say you are still earning money from books you wrote 20 years ago.

I want all of my films to belong to me.

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.

What everybody misses here is that we are doing the same thing my father did. He licensed and litigated and protected his property, and we have to follow the same tradition, because the way the law reads, if you don't protect it, you lose it.

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

If you don't have the rights, you can't do the show.

Copyright is too valuable to be wholly renounced.

If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.

An intellectual property worker will take copyright protection on everything he can get.

What we are fighting for is the intent of copyright as it is described in the US constitution: the promotion of culture.

All intellectual property rights are just licenses granted by society because it was thought, rightly or wrongly, that society as a whole would benefit by granting them. But in any particular situation, we have to ask: are we really better off granting such license? What kind of act are we licensing a person to do?

… the pursuit of civil rights by copyright.

Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly ... It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

I've copyrighted 3,000 songs.

I started writing songs in high school, so you had to write this stuff out and register it with the Library of Congress. You had to learn how to do that stuff.

The most important thing about intellectual property vs. creative expression is that copyright law was created not to stifle creativity but to encourage creativity.

If someone has copyright over some piece of your stuff, you can sell it without permission from the copyright holder because the copyright holder can only control the 'first-sale.' The Supreme Court has recognized this doctrine since 1908.