Al Franken Quotes

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 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 piracy, people think it's about getting stuff for free. It's not - it's about getting rid of the middleman that stands between you and your enjoyment of the film or music.

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.'

Even if there were no illegal copying, the advent of digital distribution will put a lot of stress on the movie and music industry. When the distribution costs comes down, that puts more price pressure on the rest of the cost.

This kid came up with Napster, and before that, none of us thought of content protection.

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.

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

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.

It'll be the Internet and piracy that will kill film. There's a philosophy that the Internet should be free, but the reality is that piracy will destroy the film industry and film as an art form because it's expensive to make a movie. Maybe you'll have funky little independent movies, and it'll go back and then start up again some other way.

It's the big boys, the Googles of this world, that are already benefiting from piracy and not paying the artists a dime.

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.

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

I've always believed that the best way you combat intellectual property theft is making a product available that is well priced, well timed to market, whether it's a movie product, TV product, music product, even theme-park product.

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

Until the governments don't have a clear law against piracy and the digital downloads are not working worldwide properly, the record industry will keep on suffering.

I don't like piracy but if anybody's concerned about piracy, why don't they pay attention to our role in it?

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.

If you create something, you don't want someone else to go and profit from it; you have your right to make a living and everything. So I respect copyright. What I don't respect is copyright extremism. And I what I don't respect is a business model that encourages piracy.

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.

Megaupload is not responsible for the piracy problem. It's the old business model of Hollywood that is responsible for it, and they want to keep that model alive at any cost.

In making policy designed with copyright in mind, you end up making decisions about whether other important technologies, such as privacy-enhancing or file-search technologies, should be encouraged or discouraged. A collision is happening between creativity and protecting IP.

The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good.

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

Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get pirated by performing live. I don't think there will be as many people showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing. We need to make sure piracy is dealt with effectively.