Courtney Love, multi-platinum singer and actress:
"Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts."
Courtney Love does the math, Salon, June 14, 2000.
John Perry Barlow, of the Grateful Dead:
"Speaking as the fellow who co-wrote Cassidy, I don't believe that the [Napster-using] kid in Ohio is injuring my economic interests by sharing it with others. Deadheads have been sharing our songs with each other for decades and it's done nothing but increase the demand for our work."
Napster's Enormous Music Room, Editorial for the New York Times, May 12, 2000.
Lawrence Lessig, Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School:
"We are at a critical moment in the history of our future because we are now witnessing the defeat of what 2000 years had built -- the defeat of the open society, the triumph of the closed society, and the destruction of an intellectual commons. And we are witnessing this defeat at the hands of an enemy who has coopted...the ideal of property."
Reclaiming a Commons, keynote address at Harvard Law School's "Building a Digital Commons" conference, May 20, 1999.
"Copyright has morphed from a short, relatively insignificant regulation of publishers [of which there were about 130 in 1790], to a restriction that is effectively perpetual, and that regulates everyone with access to a computer."
The Limits of Copyright, The Standard, June 19, 2000.
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), United States Congress:
"We all depend on the ability to make convenience and incidental copies of copyrighted materials, without having to pay a fee, and without having to get the prior consent of the copyright owners. In fact, fair use rights to obtain and use a wide array of information, are essential to the exercise of our cherished First Amendment rights. The very vibrancy of our democracy is dependent on the information, availability and use, that is facilitated by the fair use doctrine."
Keynote address to the Consumer Electronics Association "Digital Download" conference, March 6, 2001.
Ian Clarke, Freenet Project:
"I was in the pub last night, and a guy asked me for a light for his cigarette. I suddenly realised that there was a demand here and money to be made, and so I agreed to light his cigarette for 10 pence, but I didn't actually give him a light, I sold him a license to burn his cigarette. My fire-license restricted him from giving the light to anybody else, after all, that fire was my property. He was drunk, and dismissing me as a loony, but accepted my fire (and by implication the licence which governed its use) anyway. Of course in a matter of minutes I noticed a friend of his asking him for a light and to my outrage he gave his cigarette to his friend and pirated my fire! I was furious, I started to make my way over to that side of the bar but to my added horror his friend then started to light other people's cigarettes left, right, and centre! Before long that whole side of the bar was enjoying MY fire without paying me anything. Enraged I went from person to person grabbing their cigarettes from their hands, throwing them to the ground, and stamping on them.
Strangely the door staff exhibited no respect for my property rights as they threw me out the door."
Post to "Pho" mailing list, July 20, 2000.
John Gilmore, Electronic Frontier Foundation:
"A tiny tail of 'copyright protection' is wagging the big dog of communications among humans... Distorting the law and the technology of human communication and computing, in order to protect the interests of copyright holders, makes the world poorer overall."
What's Wrong with Copy Protection, February 16, 2001.
Thomas Jefferson
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813.