Edwin Catmull Quotes

People have to respect intellectual property.

If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.

To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.

A country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab and couldn't travel anyway but sideways and backwards.

If you do come up with a new idea, in 4 seconds it will belong to somebody else.

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

Creating something new is the difficult part. To make it and build it and get everyone to follow? Amazing.

Innovation is applied creativity. By definition, innovation is always about introducing something new, or improved, or both and it is usually assumed to be a positive thing.

I think there's always room for more innovation and new things.

What I like on Kickstarter is when I see real innovation and I see people building something new. It makes me sad when I see things that are just the same technology; you aren't passing the technology forward.

A lot of my business is about protecting creativity.

Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.

A man with an invention on which he has spent his life, but has no means to get it developed for the good of humanity - or even patented for himself - must feel the pinch of poverty very acutely.

An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man.

Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.

We should have more invention.

The reality is, is that we love competition, at Apple. We think it makes us all better. But we want people to invent their own stuff.

A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

What makes our world so fascinating is that continuously there are novel and creative ideas spurring people to leave old ways and try something new.

In America, innovation does not just improve our lives. It is the way we make our living.

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen — the Internet — has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.