Dan Smith Quotes

A lot of the images I use are already out there in the public or in the news. I just steal them or photograph them or repaint them, so they've already been talked about, already been consumed.

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.

A brainy person does not abuse copyright; instead they respect it and uphold it.

The creative works of the entertainment industry belong to the millions of people who make them and are not for others to steal or unlawfully distribute.

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 understand why some kid in his bedroom in Wisconsin thinks downloading songs couldn't hurt anyone. True fans will buy the CD or go see the movie after downloading, but to say it doesn't affect anyone - come on.

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

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

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

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.

The thing that sucks the most about it is that everybody steals music. You spend thousands and thousands of dollars to make a record and all of these scumbags are just stealing it.

From what I understand about Shakespeare - which isn't a lot - there was no copyright law when he was writing. He sampled at will, and it wasn't seen as a bad thing.

When it comes to music, movies, literature, paintings, and even Bikram yoga, it's pretty easy to have an opinion about whether something has been copied. Software, on the other hand, was an awkward late addition to the original Copyright Act of 1976, shoehorned into section 102(a) as a 'literary work.'

I think piracy itself is going to end up going away.

We are a cut-and-paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut-and-paste culture is criminal. Well, it's only criminal if there's nothing out there that you can freely cut and paste. If we increasingly mark material as available for these non-commercial uses, then people will have the opportunity to see its importance.

I believe in copyright, but I don't believe in copyright extremism.

Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses--like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work--that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.

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.'

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.

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.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid.

I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others.

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.