Cory Doctorow Quotes

Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.

I've got a guy in my office that works 24/7 to shut down websites that are putting 'Dead Air' on the net for free - ripping us off. The problem is many people are of the mindset that says, 'If I can watch it for free, I'll watch it.'

People downloading my stories from the bit torrent sites were never going to buy them anyway. It's no money out of my pocket.

Napster was predicating its business model on violation of copyright.

For every IP block, DRM, and who-knows-what security feature Hollywood spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on, some piracy kid will undo it for free and within a couple of minutes.

New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren't. Fight back.

Today, we see some "file sharing" sites that rely on fans uploading cracked copies of ebooks, and which then make money off those books by charging for downloads (via cash subscriptions or advertising). Again: I take a dim view of this. They're making money off the back of my work without paying me.

The fact that file sharing goes on, and is as popular as it is, is an incredibly positive thing for the music industry. The fact is that music is so popular that people are willing to break the law to get it.

Online piracy needs to be dealt with itself, because people are just wholesale stealing people's work and not paying for it. It's very hard to figure out a way to fix it.

If you don't move to protect copyright, if you don't move to protect our children, it's not going to sit well.

Given that you'll never be able to prevent copying, the question is, what can you do to minimize it? What can you do to make consumers happy enough with legitimate use of the system that they'll be willing to pay for it?

Piracy is a huge, huge issue for all of these major content companies, and everybody has a different way of addressing it.

On scores of sites, users can upload illegal files of my books. As per 1998's toothless Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I bear the burden of discovering and reporting each theft.

I think copyright has its right to exist, absolutely, and I think that it's up to copyright creators to come up with new solutions that deal with the reality of the world we're living in today.

If you are extremely well known and have a very desirable product, then yes, you probably do suffer a bit from piracy, in the same way that if you make a lot of money, you pay more in taxes than if you don't make any money.

It is piracy, not overt online music stores, which is our main competitor.

One of the things that drives me crazy is the belief in Hollywood that bittorrent exists solely for stealing things.

Money spent by Hollywood to fight piracy: hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think that prosecuting some college kid because she shared a file is a lot like sending somebody to Australia 200 years ago for poaching his lordship's rabbit. That's how it must seem to poor people who just want to watch a crappy movie for free after they’ve been working themselves to death all day at Tesco or whatever, you know.

I wouldn't even say the internet is a gift and a curse for hip-hop. All types of music are bootlegged, including movies which are bootlegged.

Most people still steal music.

Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty.

My sense is that file sharing started in predominantly white, middle- and upper-middle-cl ass young people who were native-born, who felt they were entitled to have something for free, because that's what they were used to.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It's a service issue.

Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?