Marvin Ammori Quotes

Oh, in France you can't defame an idea, only a person.

Either we, as a society, decide that copyright is the greater value to society, and take active steps to give up private communications as a concept. Either that, or we decide that the ability to communicate in private, without constant monitoring by authorities, has the greater value - in which case copyright will have to give way.

I think the reality is that copyright law has for a very long time been a tiny little part of American jurisprudence, far removed from traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, and that made sense before the Internet. Now there is an unavoidable link between First Amendment interests and the scope of copyright law. The legal system is recognizing for the first time the extraordinary expanse of copyright regulation and its regulation of ordinary free-speech activities.

The thing I have come to find astonishing is that people from all political sides routinely say that the Internet has to be the model of free speech and freedom.

We're in a situation where the solutions that we have are not good enough. The way to improve anything is to have a discussion about its flaws. To understand what the one or two or three things are about it that would help fix it. The DMCA makes it dangerous to have that conversation.

It's time to debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for downloading them.

The Internet's distinct configuration may have facilitated anonymous threats, copyright infringement, and cyberattacks, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom in ways that the framers of the American constitution would appreciate - the Federalist papers were famously authored pseudonymously.

The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites.

I can imagine Iceland becoming a good place to run a controversial Web site. But... Iceland may find itself forced to defend controversial speech.

The basic idea of defamation law is simple. It is an attempt to balance the private right to protect one's reputation with the public right to freedom of speech …. defamation law is often used by the rich and powerful to deter criticisms. It is seldom helpful to ordinary people whose reputations are attacked unfairly.

The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject however pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason, nor any masterly compositions on the general nature of governmetn ...

The Internet provides a medium for distributing censored cartoons.

Every person may freely speak, write, and publish on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty; and in all trials for libel, both civil and criminal, the truth, when published with good motives and for justifiable ends, shall be a sufficient defense

For better or worse, we are the Court of Appeals for the Hollywood Circuit. Millions of people toil in the shadow of the law we make, and much of their livelihood is made possible by the existence of intellectual property rights. But much of their livelihood - and much of the vibrancy of our culture - also depends on the existence of other intangible rights: The right to draw ideas from a rich and varied public domain, and the right to mock, for profit as well as fun, the cultural icons of our time.

Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.

Certain governments are suggesting that bloggers and tweeters aren't 'real' writers and, so, don't merit protection. A writer is anyone from a Nobel laureate to a debut blogger. They all get PEN's attention.

If you write a written book, you're gonna get slowed up by lawyers wanting to see what you say about this person, that person - I couldn't be bothered with it.

The types of ideas protected by intellectual-property law typically don't include a clever catchphrase on a Vine or a film idea in a tweet.

Can any sane person say that before something comes on the Net you must screen it? How can there be pre-screening?

Experience has shown us that attempts to control the Internet will invariably fail. We should be instructed by the failed efforts of China to regulate political content, the efforts of America to regulate Internet gambling, or the efforts of Australia to regulate certain speech. By its very nature, the Internet will always resist such controls.

The First Amendment protects the Internet.

The beauty of American law is you cannot slander anybody who is dead. This is not true in all countries.

You can't just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can't incite people to crime. There's all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.

The threat [of the U.S. bills SOPA and PIPA] is the inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share.