Bram Cohen Quotes

I hope that the movie industry will learn from the experiences of the music industry and will be much more constructive in their approach to P2P.

With BitTorrent, the cat's out of the bag.

What's the right way to think about the distribution part of Steam? You need to worry about viruses and people trying to publish other people's content, but the underlying thing is to eliminate that barrier between people who create stuff and people who want to have access to it.

If the search engines don't respect the creators, there won't be anything to search in the future because creators have to make a living too.

I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific, but I could see a system like Napster evolving into something that allows users to locate and retrieve different types of data other than just MP3s or audio files.

When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn't exist, and we didn't need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online.

I was never a Lime Wire guy because it's too much hassle to find the song.

They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases.

There are literally tens of thousands of very good content providers in the world that don't distribute their content through TV channels.

In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.

There is a huge market for interesting content to be made by interesting creators.

I would never put a movie on YouTube unless the funding was right, or unless YouTube paid for it or something.

Today NBC makes certain content available online and I can't imagine we will change that process.

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.

Napster is a consumer revolt. Napster is about my right to have this music and to share if I've paid for it. You know, so we start to see our decisions, our opportunities, our every choice is a consumer choice.

I think music sharing of any kind is great.

People think that it's their sovereign right to download music and not have to pay for it.

The one thing that's important to know is Hulu's not looking for traffic to be sent to hulu.com from its relationships with Yahoo and Fancast and MSN.

I challenge record companies to show me evidence of a single penny they've lost due to Napster.

Books are so cheap and easy to get that people don't bother stealing them, which is the essential rule of piracy that the music business learned much too late.

I have no problem with people illegally downloading stuff. I'm not going to drive hard into 'You should buy my stuff,' because really, it's inevitable. If you like a song, you're going to download it for free. I have no problem with that.

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.

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

I have a very difficult time getting the Napster world.

Napster was predicating its business model on violation of copyright.