Copyright Reform Quotes

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

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.

We would reduce copyright terms to a more sensible term of 10 years.

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.

As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture.

Seriously, I feel more like a revolutionary because the final goal is not only to download all the articles and books and give open access to them, but to change legislation is such a way that free distribution of research papers will not face any legal obstacles.

I'm not a big believer in our copyright laws; I find them way too restrictive.

A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.

All over the world copyright holders are trying to limit consumers' rights. We cannot have that.

The Pirate Party believes it's time to think about digital rights rather than digital privilege.

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.

Copyright law is a dinosaur, ill-suited for the landscape of today's media.

If the contest for an international copyright is to be managed like the annual pig-iron conflict, or the wool fight, ending in a compromise by which every interest gets a certain amount of protection at the expense of the public, it will certainly be of little service either to England, America, or humanity at large. What is needed is a legal protection for property in ideas; in other words, an authors' copyright.

I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.

It's my mission to sue the MPAA and take them down. I don't know how to go about doing that. But to me, it seems like it's something that has to be taken care of.

I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information.

That free culture was carried to America; that was our birth — 1790. We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered "printing." Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years.

Information wants to be free.

The terms of copyright last far too long: either the life of the author plus 70 years after death for a personal work or 95 years for a corporate work. That length doesn't encourage more authorship - it merely limits the speakers who could share powerful speeches, books, and films.

Vigorous enforcement of copyrights themselves is an important part of the picture. But I don't think that expanding the legal definition of copyright outside of actual copyright infringement is the right move.

It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.

The crystal ball has a question mark in its center. There are some fundamental choices to be made. We will either choose to continue to wage a hopeless war to preserve the existing architecture for copyright by upping the stakes and using better weapons to make sure that people respect it. If we do this, public support for copyright will continue to weaken, pushing creativity underground and producing a generation that is alienated from the copyright concept.

I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.

What we are fighting for is the intent of copyright as it is described in the US constitution: the promotion of culture.

All content should be copied without restriction. But for education and research, copyright laws are especially damaging.