Digital Piracy Quotes

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

The pirating thing is bad. The people it hurts the most are the ones you least think it hurts. It's not the big Britney Spears albums that are being pirated; it's the indie bands that don't have two cents to their name.

The public feels that if it's on the Internet and you can access it, you deserve it. You haven't committed any kind of crime. We may even have to rename piracy. But in any case, we have to confront it.

I can still make a living with touring. And maybe you buy a t-shirt. And I would rather 10 million people get my record and listen to it for free than 500,000 that I coerced to pay $15 for it, you know?

Both SOPA and PIPA are toxic. My view is that anyone who supports these bills either doesn't understand what they are supporting or is simply no friend of innovation. And, if you are no friend of innovation, I can't support you in any way, as innovation is the lifeblood of our economy, our country, and what I've dedicated my life to.

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

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.

I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not doing it to make a profit off my labor. You share things with people and I think information, and art, and ideas should be shared.

When people who are songwriters say 'That's my property and if you give it away for free then I'll lose my incentive,' then, well, good riddance.

The thing that concerns me most is that, in the digital age, if we fail to make efforts to maintain the value of our content, there is the high possibility for the value to be greatly reduced, as the history of the music industry has shown.

Napster's only alleged liability is for contributory or vicarious infringement. So when Napster's users engage in noncommercial sharing of music, is that activity copyright infringement? No.

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

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.

When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese websites for pirated content, a blind eye is generally turned to the fact that ensuing crackdowns provide a great excuse to tighten mechanisms to censor all content the Chinese government doesn't like.

I don't believe every download is a lost sale.

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

So DeCSS didn't introduce anything new for pirating and had already been available.

The Internet is all about accessing entertainment. Realistically, 50 to 80 percent of all traffic is people downloading stuff for free. If you can turn that huge market share into something that you can monetize, even if it is just with ads, you will end up making more money than with all other revenue streams combined.

I get sick when I think about someone going to iTunes and downloading two songs off our album. It's not meant to be listened to that way.

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.

The same applies to the music and film industries. Until the heads of the labels start wanting to make money rather than creating controversy, tension, and excuses about why piracy is making the job so hard that no one could do it but them - and oh by the way, they need a raise to really focus in on the fight - the music industry is going to have a very tough time of it.

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.

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.

Stealing things is everybody's problem. We [Apple Inc.] own a lot of intellectual property, and we don't like when people steal it. So people are stealing stuff and we're optimists. We believe that 80 percent of the people stealing stuff don't want to be; there's just no legal alternative.

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.