Piracy is almost always a service problem.
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.
The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.
The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.
Let's face it; people are doing everything online these days. So if they are going to watch my movies, I'm happy as long as it's being bought legally and being exhibited legally, as long as they are paying even a small fee for it. I'm just anti-piracy. If it's a legitimate way of watching film online, then I'm very happy.
Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.
… the pursuit of civil rights by copyright.
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.
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.
Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.
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.
I'm not a lawyer I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.
We are passionate about making it so that users enjoy the music that they want to enjoy but at the same time fairly compensates artists. That's not the same as saving the music industry.
Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.
We protect monopolies with copyright.
I don't believe every download is a lost sale.
When we started making mixtapes, we were just ripping stuff off YouTube and DVDs, naively thinking that because we were putting it up for free, it was gonna be fine.
As the Kindle's dread grip on digital publishing is challenged by tablet computers and Android smartphones, with their bright screens and high resolution, the need for illustration is growing.
Unfortunately writers take a very small part of the profit on their books, and I think in the e-book world there is a real danger they will take even less, unless they are vigilant and robust about protecting their own interests.
Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
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.
If you tell people they can't burn CDs of their music, as almost every current legal music service has done, or they can only burn one CD with a track or pay per track per burn extra, nobody is going to go for it.
So DeCSS didn't introduce anything new for pirating and had already been available.
I was never a Lime Wire guy because it's too much hassle to find the song.
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.
