Alexandra Elbakyan Quotes

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

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

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

Creativity in copyright law only means that you didn’t copy it from someone else …. Most works that are protected under copyright are not creative in the colloquial sense of the word.

I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.

A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.

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

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.

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.

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

That free culture was carried to America; that was our birth — 1790. We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered "printing." Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years.

The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for "limited times." By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.

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.

We would reduce copyright terms to a more sensible term of 10 years.

With the copyright now extended to the life of the creator plus 100 years, for the first time in history no person henceforth will ever be able to freely use any work created in his lifetime.

The Supreme Court has crafted doctrines such as 'fair use,' which permits copying materials for criticism, parody, and transformative uses, and has ruled that abstract ideas are not subject to copyright, because courts will not punish people for merely using an abstract concept in speech.

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

Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles. Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place.

From what I understand about Shakespeare - which isn't a lot - there was no copyright law when he was writing. He sampled at will, and it wasn't seen as a bad thing.

We are a cut-and-paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut-and-paste culture is criminal. Well, it's only criminal if there's nothing out there that you can freely cut and paste. If we increasingly mark material as available for these non-commercial uses, then people will have the opportunity to see its importance.

Copyright law is a dinosaur, ill-suited for the landscape of today's media.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

I believe in copyright, but I don't believe in copyright extremism.

Fair use is always going to be a gray area, and it should be. We need to allow for things we can't see yet.

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.