Phil Elverum Quotes

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.

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.

The ability to make new work from old work - especially if that new work is different enough that it doesn't dent the market for the old work - is something that benefits all creators, since so few can claim not to have a giant or 10 supporting them underneath.

I think music sharing of any kind is great.

With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music.

I like the old days when, if I wrote a song and I recorded it, it didn't mean somebody else couldn't record it.

Once you put songs out, they're not yours anymore. They're everyone else's.

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.

Songs aren't owned by anyone.

I'm happy if my music is being downloaded, whether it's legally or illegally.

I would happy for someone to download my music.

I challenge record companies to show me evidence of a single penny they've lost due to Napster.

I have no problem with people illegally downloading stuff. I'm not going to drive hard into 'You should buy my stuff,' because really, it's inevitable. If you like a song, you're going to download it for free. I have no problem with that.

But since I am in the music industry, I don't want anyone to download music, not on September 9th.

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

Sometimes, a remix is good because it reaches a whole new generation. But when it gets too much, it's irritating. Also, the original composer needs to be credited properly.

It's the big boys, the Googles of this world, that are already benefiting from piracy and not paying the artists a dime.

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do

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.

What we are fighting for is the intent of copyright as it is described in the US constitution: the promotion of culture.

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

In the old days, people shared music; they didn't care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.

Talking about remixes, some people like to preserve what is original and some people give it a new meaning. Coming to Hip Hop, the biggest of the artists use sampling. You are changing the genre of the song and to be able to give old music in new package is also fair and people who have emotions attached to it - they are also not wrong.

Governments can help support European music by promoting public awareness that when people take music that doesn't belong to them, they undermine the future of those very artists whose work they enjoy.

You can't complain about everybody that steals your sound. You'll be fighting for years trying to figure out how to make people not steal it.