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A huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners of copyrighted material. We do not like it because we think it wrong and unfair.
Oct 1, 2025
Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.
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.
The copy price of the future is the copyright.
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.
I definitely believe people should pay for copyrighted works. And the laws are sufficient: They already require you to pay for copyright work. There's no confusion. The problem is...it's a heck of a lot easier to steal MP3s than to buy them.
Anyone who knows anything should know you cannot take a master track of a recording and write another song over the top of it. You just can't do that. You can call it a tribute or whatever you want to call it, but it's against the law. That's a problem with some of the younger generation, they don't understand the concept of intellectual property and copyright.
The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.
I spend all my time right now trying to combat music retail and copyright.
If I take that person and play them as a record I'm becoming not only a conductor and composer of collage, but at the same time I'm looking at a whole layer of what goes into copyright law, who owns those memories, who owns the way that that sound gets remixed and transformed and above all how much fun it is to actually just mess with other people's stuff.
The copyright industry has managed to kill civil liberties for their own children, ushering in a dystopian surveillance machine, merely to avoid taking responsibility for their own business failures. I lack words to quantify my contempt for these utter parasites.
Of course, corporations and governments have a right to something for their money. They pay the wages. But they don't have the ethical right to literally purchase the copyright of a citizen's potential contribution to society. In a democracy they should not have the legal right to silence the quasi-totality of the functioning élite in order to satisfy a managerial taste for control and secrecy.
Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection. This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth. Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good -- for society, and not just for monopoly holders.
I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.
The war against illegal file-sharing is like the church's age-old war against masturbation. It's a war you just can't win.
Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.
Unfortunately you can't copyright a title... bummer.
What I really think is that our current model of copyright is fundamentally broken. We badly need to replace it with a different system for remunerating creators, which gets it the hell out of the face of the public (who were never aware of it to begin with in the pre-internet dead tree era). Unfortunately, the current copyright model is enshrined in international trade treaty law, making it almost impossible to work around.
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.
This song ain't black or white and as far as I know it don't infringe on anyone's copyright.
The problem with copyright enforcement is that when the parameters aren't incredibly well defined, it means big corporations, who have deeper pockets and better lawyers, can bully people.
I'm not a big believer in our copyright laws; I find them way too restrictive.
As long as copyright is breached in Iran and international works are being freely published in magazines and newspapers, no one feels any need for Iranian works.
One of many challenges is of course to create a legal basis for copyright issues that's up to date with both modern distribution, consumer behavior and the rights and needs of creators and copyright holders.
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.
You have to be careful when it comes to copyrights, whether just sounding like or feeling like something is enough to say you violated their copyrights because there's a lot of music out there, and there's a lot of things that feel like other things that are influenced by other things. And you don't want to get into that thing where all of us are suing each other all the time because this and that song feels like another song.
I have stood in a bar in Lambourn and been offered, in the space of five minutes, a poached salmon, a leg of a horse, a free trip to Chantilly, marriage, a large unsolicited loan, ten tips for a ten-horse race, two second-hand cars, a fight, and the copyright to a dying jockey's life story.
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.
The world is right because I feel good. p. 83, Awareness, copyright 1990
National law has no place in cyberlaw. Where is cyberspace? If you don't like banking laws in the United States, set up your machine on the Grand Cayman Islands. Don't like the copyright laws in the United States? Set up your machine in China. Cyberlaw is global law, which is not going to be easy to handle, since we seemingly cannot even agree on world trade of automobile parts.
My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.
Every artist learns through imitation, but I rather doubt the aim of these things is artistic development. I assume they're either homages or satiric riffs, and are not intended to be taken too seriously as works in their own right. Otherwise I should be talking to a copyright lawyer.
I think art is the only thing that's spiritual in the world. And I refuse to forced to believe in other people's interpretations of God. I don't think anybody should be. No one person can own the copyright to what God means.
Every night on my show, The Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, okay? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it "The No Fact Zone.
Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.
The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.
In 2002, Google began an ambitious project to digitize every book in the world. It was intended as a search project: type in a query, and Google would show you snippets. They asked university libraries for books, which they would scan for free. At Harvard we didn't permit them to take works under copyright, but other libraries gave them everything.
Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.
The Pirate Party started in Sweden in 2006, and it only had one agenda: to change draconian copyright laws. But it's changed and shifted primarily because the questions of human rights and cyber have become much more relevant. So if you want to place it somewhere on the spectrum, I would say it's a party that has its roots in civilian rights. But we are not like many left parties that want to regulate citizens and create nanny states. We believe that regulation should be on the powerful, not the individuals.
Designed to ‘Effectively Frustrate’: Copyright, Technology, and the Agency of Users.
We as a music community have our own issues about advocacy, copyright, intellectual property, being paid fairly for the work that we do.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks... With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
My family achieved success not in spite of, but because of the American system of taxation. After all, without reliable and safe roads there’d have been no Disneyland; without high functioning legal systems and a well regulated business environment there would have been no copyright protection for Mickey Mouse.
I stole a lot from Gary Oldman. I stole the hairdo from his incarnation of Dracula. We cheated it just enough, so we couldn't get accused of copyright infringement.
I am dramatic,” said Will. “If I had not been a Shadowhunter, I would have had a future on the stage. I have no doubt I would have been greeted with acclaim.” Excerpt From: Clare, Cassandra. “Clockwork Princess.” Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2013-03-19T00:00:00+00:00. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
How much greater would their contributions to the U.S. economy be if U.S. copyright owners could access foreign markets otherwise dominated by pirate product?
New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren't. Fight back.
Either we, as a society, decide that copyright is the greater value to society, and take active steps to give up private communications as a concept. Either that, or we decide that the ability to communicate in private, without constant monitoring by authorities, has the greater value - in which case copyright will have to give way.
It's the golden age of French cinema again but it's because Sarkozy had the guts to push through copyright law.