Wendell Berry Quotes

The most important thing about intellectual property vs. creative expression is that copyright law was created not to stifle creativity but to encourage creativity.

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.

Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.

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

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.

A brainy person does not abuse copyright; instead they respect it and uphold it.

Creativity in copyright law only means that you didn’t copy it from someone else …. Most works that are protected under copyright are not creative in the colloquial sense of the word.

Copyright law is too confusing.

Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away from England her authors.

We are a cut-and-paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut-and-paste culture is criminal. Well, it's only criminal if there's nothing out there that you can freely cut and paste. If we increasingly mark material as available for these non-commercial uses, then people will have the opportunity to see its importance.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

Facts, even false ones, cannot be copyrighted.

You cannot steal somebody's intellectual property. Law and justice protect.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid.

A lot of the images I use are already out there in the public or in the news. I just steal them or photograph them or repaint them, so they've already been talked about, already been consumed.

Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

I understand the worries of many - not only here in this auditorium -, and some have already written to me to say that technical progress has lowered the threshold that stops people from helping themselves to protected works without the slightest embarrassment.

An act to vest authors with their copies, for the times therein mentioned.

Copyleft

The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions — knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions and ideas — become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.

For better or worse, we are the Court of Appeals for the Hollywood Circuit. Millions of people toil in the shadow of the law we make, and much of their livelihood is made possible by the existence of intellectual property rights. But much of their livelihood - and much of the vibrancy of our culture - also depends on the existence of other intangible rights: The right to draw ideas from a rich and varied public domain, and the right to mock, for profit as well as fun, the cultural icons of our time.

There are people out there who don't see value in intellectual property, and so they're always going to have a problem if there are lawsuits involving intellectual property.

I do think that copyrights and intellectual property are important - it's important to be able to keep people from making verbatim copies of a particular creation that could somehow hurt the creator.

No one under international copyright law has the right to depict me or my husband without our consent. I have been surprised by the many people, particularly Americans, who are either writing books or going to produce films about the Mandela family without even bothering to consult us.