Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees. Harper & Row, 1988.
In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt challenged incumbent President William Howard Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. Roosevelt had the popular support of most Republicans but the Taft regulars had control of the party machinery and the convention being held in Chicago:. The headline appeared on the front page and every other page of the issue.
The interview was taking place next to a New York City street vendor who was selling a number of Gruen’s most famous copyrighted photographs. They were being reproduced in violation of his copyright, but this quotation illustrated a benefit to the creator of intellectual property from pirated material. Gruen has become one of the most famous photographers in America and his work is recognized by millions, most of whom have viewed his work from illegal copies.
Both the Republican and Democratic Parties were ripe with graft—the Democrats in control of many large city machines and the Republicans getting bribes and “donations” from the corporations.
This was a poem on copyright infringement which he held wrong. In American history, there has always been a significant part of the American population who were opposed to copyright on both moral and public policy grounds. In the first decades of existence, the United States did not legally recognize copyright. American publishers copied and republished English works with no compunctions. Benjamin Franklin was one of the worst offenders for people who saw it as an offence. English publishers and some American authors lobbied heavily in America and finally got Congress to pass copyright legislation. However, with every new technology, the battle is fought anew, and large numbers of Americans will use copyrighted material contrary to existing law and feel morally justified in doing so, Publishers and other owners of intellectual property then over compensate and they have lobbied heavily to stop what they call piracy by impinging what used to be the legitimate rights of consumers, readers and scholars—even those who were not violating copyright. It is another of those American political issues that never gets settled and is battled in almost every generation.
Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally.
