Richard Stallman Quotes

In the epic war over Silicon Valley's intellectual property, Bill Gates was on the side of licensing copyright and robust protections for intellectual property. He wasn't on the side of the hackers, and he didn't want information to be free.

I oppose piracy and want to see intellectual property protected because that is what fosters and rewards innovation. But SOPA won't accomplish a meaningful reduction in piracy and causes massive collateral damage to the Internet ecosystem.

Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.

If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works.

Basically, if reverse engineering is banned, then a lot of the open source community is doomed to fail.

While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.

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 approach that the music industry took to fight piracy was the wrong strategy.

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

Napster was a black market for music. Ninety-nine per cent of the music that people were downloading was illegal because they didn't have the rights for it.

Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.

Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.

The U.S. government is saying that my website enabled piracy when the entire Internet is enabling piracy. Every ISP that connects people to the Internet is enabling piracy - Google is, YouTube is, everybody is.

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.

The use of pirated software in China is really quite a sizeable loss to our software producers.

Napster was predicating its business model on violation of copyright.

Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

Somebody will be able to crack ebook files in the same way that people cracked music files a decade ago. An author could have worked for three years on his book, have someone buy it for their Kindle for £6.99 and then see it shared with everyone in the world for free.

I still haven't heard anything from Apple about my hacks. There is a tool based on my work reverse-engineering Apple's FairPlay called jhymn that's been hosted on a U.S. server for over a year and nothing has happened.

Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted.

Hollywood and the recording industry argue that current law permits the copying of songs and movies, and sharing them on the Internet. This enables young people to grow up learning how to steal.

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.

I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file. But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you.

The British judiciary needs to support intellectual property.