John Polson Quotes

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.

Well, you might as well imitate your own program because if you don't, someone else will.

Everyone steals from something or someone.

Every new writing project, every new artistic project, needs to be protected so it can grow on its own before it begins to creep out into the world.

You're creating new things in movies and people are going to steal them.

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.

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

In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.

I didn't sit down and work out other people's material; I've never believed in that.

Like in comedy, you know the names of the people who steal things that others work really hard on. It really sucks. And, in magic, it's not just the hard work of getting the words and attitude and point of view right; you're taking an actual invention, making something over three or four years, and somebody can just take it.

Inspiration and stealing are two completely different things. If somebody wants to make a song like "Stairway to Heaven" and writes a song on acoustic guitar, Led Zeppelin does not own every song that's on acoustic guitar for the rest of time.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research.

When you snatch little pieces of other people's lives and try to palm them off as your own, that's more disgusting than anything. Robin Williams is a huge thief. Denis Leary is a huge thief. His whole stand-up career is based on Bill Hicks, a brilliant guy who died years ago.

I don't read much of what I write because I worry about unintentionally borrowing something.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

We call ourselves creators and we just copy.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

The ability to make new work from old work - especially if that new work is different enough that it doesn't dent the market for the old work - is something that benefits all creators, since so few can claim not to have a giant or 10 supporting them underneath.

I don't steal stories. If I'm a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.

The comics I hate are thieves. Nothing's more disgusting than a guy who steals another person's ideas and tries to claim them as his own.

Too afraid of plagiarising someone, so I stopped reading fiction in 1981.

If you copy then it is not self-expression.