Jeremy Rifkin Quotes

I have problems with YouTube and things like that, when you catch it mid production. If I'm doing a show and I'm working on a bit and someone's there with a phone, they record it and put it online - it's not the finished product.

Everything's changed. The technology is the big thing changing now, the way movies like 'Alice' or 'Avatar' are made. And technology on the other side, the audience side. Word spreads so fast now on a movie, with the Internet, and piracy is something coming down the line like in the music industry.

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 spend all my time right now trying to combat music retail and copyright.

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.

I don't think it's fair to pinpoint Asia in terms of piracy. It's a worldwide problem. With 'The Expendables 3,' piracy extended everywhere, and over 10 percent of it was in the United States. So I don't want to put my hands over my eyes. It's a shame there is no DVD business in a lot of Asia, certainly China and India.

The threat [of the U.S. bills SOPA and PIPA] is the inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share.

Singer/songwriters spend two or three years making an album, and then it goes up for sale and everybody pirates it and you don't make any money. Whereas, writing a film score you still get presented with a paycheck.

Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives.

I never download anything; it's crazy! We must keep buying albums and DVDs.

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.

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.

The Internet has been a blessing and a curse. The curse we know: A lot of people appropriating your intellectual property without paying for it. But I think it's important to realize the blessing of the Internet, which is that everybody has a voice and you can break through, even without a record company.

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.

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.

Many rogue sites exist to make a profit and others are enormously expensive to maintain. If they don't have the resources to continue stealing intellectual property, they'll wither away.

When the money dries up, the sites die off. That's the way to go after piracy.

Napster was predicating its business model on violation of copyright.

Somebody will be able to crack ebook files in the same way that people cracked music files a decade ago. An author could have worked for three years on his book, have someone buy it for their Kindle for £6.99 and then see it shared with everyone in the world for free.

Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

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.

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

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

Megaupload was a dual-use technology. You can use it for good things, and you can use it for bad things. If someone sends something illegal in an envelope through your postal service, you don't shut down the post office. If someone speeds with the car he just bought, you don't go to the car manufacturer and say, 'Hey, we're shutting you down.'

You can't fool yourself anymore that your art is your art. When you're not getting paid for that song that's being traded back and forth among millions of people on the Internet, you have to think like a businessperson.