Mark Helprin Quotes

If you create something, you don't want someone else to go and profit from it; you have your right to make a living and everything. So I respect copyright. What I don't respect is copyright extremism. And I what I don't respect is a business model that encourages piracy.

Piracy is a huge, huge issue for all of these major content companies, and everybody has a different way of addressing it.

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen — the Internet — has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

… the pursuit of civil rights by copyright.

Money spent by Hollywood to fight piracy: hundreds of millions of dollars.

Online piracy needs to be dealt with itself, because people are just wholesale stealing people's work and not paying for it. It's very hard to figure out a way to fix it.

Megaupload is not responsible for the piracy problem. It's the old business model of Hollywood that is responsible for it, and they want to keep that model alive at any cost.

If you don't move to protect copyright, if you don't move to protect our children, it's not going to sit well.

The U.S. government is saying that my website enabled piracy when the entire Internet is enabling piracy. Every ISP that connects people to the Internet is enabling piracy - Google is, YouTube is, everybody is.

Napster was predicating its business model on violation of copyright.

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.

Hollywood and the recording industry argue that current law permits the copying of songs and movies, and sharing them on the Internet. This enables young people to grow up learning how to steal.

I think copyright has its right to exist, absolutely, and I think that it's up to copyright creators to come up with new solutions that deal with the reality of the world we're living in today.

If SOPA were to pass, Imgur would not be able to exist. We survive on user-generated content. It would be impossible for us to police the amount of traffic we get for what is or isn't copyrighted material. It's just not possible.

I don't like piracy but if anybody's concerned about piracy, why don't they pay attention to our role in it?

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.

The crystal ball has a question mark in its center. There are some fundamental choices to be made. We will either choose to continue to wage a hopeless war to preserve the existing architecture for copyright by upping the stakes and using better weapons to make sure that people respect it. If we do this, public support for copyright will continue to weaken, pushing creativity underground and producing a generation that is alienated from the copyright concept.

Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.

This kid came up with Napster, and before that, none of us thought of content protection.

I oppose piracy and want to see intellectual property protected because that is what fosters and rewards innovation. But SOPA won't accomplish a meaningful reduction in piracy and causes massive collateral damage to the Internet ecosystem.

The marketplace can handle this. The laws are there. The courts have shown a consistent ability to find a balance between copyright owners and copyright users.

We need an unambiguous rule - a law - that nobody will step between the publisher and the consumer, full stop.

If we're talking about someone creating something new, those rights are fairly well defined (in the United States, at least) under existing copyright law. But then there's often discussion about the rights of people who produce works under work-for-hire arrangements, which can be far more subtle and nuanced.

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.

Given that you'll never be able to prevent copying, the question is, what can you do to minimize it? What can you do to make consumers happy enough with legitimate use of the system that they'll be willing to pay for it?