15 quotes
I believe it would be right for common sense to revolt against the extreme claims made today on behalf of "intellectual property."
Free Culture (2004)
Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away.
Free Culture (2004)
Some people view the public domain with contempt.
Free Culture (2004)
So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them.
Free Culture (2004)
Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.
Free Culture (2004)
A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.
Free Culture (2004)
The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result.
Free Culture (2004)
Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.
Free Culture (2004)
Eric Eldred was fighting a piracy that affects us all.
Free Culture (2004)
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.
Free Culture (2004)
Common sense is with the copyright warriors because the debate so far has been framed at the extremes — as a grand either/or: either property or anarchy, either total control or artists won't be paid.
Free Culture (2004)
There has never been a time in history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.
Free Culture (2004)
The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of "property" but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs.
Free Culture (2004)
By insisting on the Constitution's limits to copyright, obviously Eldred was not endorsing piracy. Indeed, in an obvious sense, he was fighting a kind of piracy — piracy of the public domain.
Free Culture (2004)
When it has become silly to suppose that the role of our government should be to "seek balance," then count me with the silly, for that means that this has become quite serious indeed.
Free Culture (2004)