Jens Lekman Quotes

Record companies, I found out, can put out compilations without your permission.

I was worried Microsoft would take my music. But ultimately I talked to the lawyers and I still own it.

If you want to play somebody's music, you'd better go into his house.

I spend all my time right now trying to combat music retail and copyright.

One could work on a lot of albums such as 'Thiruvasagam in Symphony,' but with issues such as illegal downloading from the Internet and piracy, it is difficult.

Ever since the decision of Robin Thicke and Pharrell, we believe that it was important to make sure that we are safe. When that Robin Thicke verdict came out, we realized that the game had changed in music.

There's this thing called compulsory licensing law that allows artists through the record companies to take your music at will without your permission.

I think Sean Parker damaged the music business with Napster.

I used to hate sampling, but it was basically because everyone was getting paid but us. But when they began to do the legislation and get it right, I realized that the kids just did something that, if maybe we were smart enough, we would have done it as well.

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.

Luther Campbell is the only person that has ever paid me for sampling me. I'm out for the rest of 'em, but the young man paid me.

Major labels don't play with samples not being cleared.

The Constitution wanted artists to have control over their works because they knew it would create incentive to create more works. That is clearly still the goal.

In regards to The Haunting, people compared it to the old movie, which is unfair. We didn't have the rights to the movie. I couldn't duplicate a single thing because that would have been legal infringement.

The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens.

I've never gotten money from most of those records. And I made those records: In the studio, they'd just give me a bunch of words, I'd make up a song! The rhythm and everything. 'Good Golly Miss Molly'! And I didn't get a dime for it.

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.

We're on the path of creating monopoly business practices out of copyright law.

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do

An act to vest authors with their copies, for the times therein mentioned.

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 have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying. Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.

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.

The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries

… the pursuit of civil rights by copyright.