Authorship Rights Quotes

Copyright rewards originality, not effort.

It's one thing if you write a song and somebody else sings it because you give the OK. But if your voice is on something and you don't get the credit, it's kind of hard.

Originally, when I wrote the song 'The Sensual World' I had used text from the end of 'Ulysses.' When I asked for permission to use the text, I was refused, which was disappointing.

We safeguard the right to attribution very strongly. After all, what we are fighting for is the intent of copyright as it is described in the US constitution: the promotion of culture. Many artists are using recognition as their primary driving force to create culture.

It seems like every few years a big name author will holler something about how evil, heinous, and morally wrong fan fiction and fan fiction writers are, and then the Internet gets all upset and shocked, and then the author is shocked that people could get so upset.

You need to recognize that the copyright date on a book reflects when it came out, not when it was written - assume that the information in the book is at least a year older than the copyright date, and possibly two.

Everything that I write will be signed with my name.

People can take your name and write a book about you and they make money off of it. How is the public supposed to know you're not authorizing that book? As soon as you make a big stink about it it only makes the book sell more.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

That's the problem today: Who is the creator?

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

Who has ownership over stories these days?

Copyright and Trademark are completely different things. Copyright prevents anyone from copying this article and posting it somewhere else. Copyright happens instantaneously the moment I write something down that is unique and from my brain. Trademarks are far more restrictive.

I write my own quotes. Except this one. I obviously stole this from somebody really clever.

On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie. I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’

I think people who sample are cheating. It is like people who do collages. Use all of your own stuff.

I'm pretty ruthless about that; I think when you sign over your story, you sign over your story.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

I don't believe in the ownership of work.

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.

I want all of my films to belong to me.

When I created the email in the U.S., my mentor could have easily copyrighted it and taken credit for it.

I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.