Quotes & Sayings About 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. If I spend time conceiving and making a piece of art and somebody else sees that it has market value and replicates it in order to steal part of my market, then that's not cool. — Shepard Fairey

We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy. — Jeffrey Sachs

We are born rich, it is for us to decide between materialistic poorness or building upon intellectual richness. — Vishwas Chavan

In the world of intellectual property, armies of lawyers (often employed by non-practicing entities, as I mentioned in chapter 6) do battle to seize the property of others - usually small businesses that are relatively defenseless. — Sam Wilkin

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling "Thief."
If he is wise he has not been impoverished.
Nor has the fool been enriched.
The thief flatters us by stealing.
We flatter him by complaining. — Ben Hecht

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology. — Eric Allman

We had made a - sort of a national decision that we wanted to be this intellectual property country, where we would have things manufactured in China, but we would do the design, we would do the creative stuff.And now what we have done is, we have forgotten that that's what we wanted, and we're making the intellectual stuff more and more free. And, so, we're sort of left with less and less. — Esther Dyson

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. — Alex Kozinski

No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind. — Mark Helprin

I think intellectual property is more like land, and copyright violation is more like trespass. Even though you don't take anything away from the landowner when you trespass, most people understand and respect the laws that make it illegal. The real crime in copyright violation is not the making of the copies, it's the expropriation of the creator's right to control the creation. — Brad Templeton

These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas. — Matt Ridley

I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. — Philip Pullman

I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented. — Michael Heizer

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

India's IP policy reflects the confusion in the minds of the policymakers . — Kalyan C. Kankanala

If you think you'll find intellectual stimulation, you're thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I've never been more bored by casual chat. — Andrew Sullivan

Many rogue sites exist to make a profit and others are enormously expensive to maintain. If they don't have the resources to continue stealing intellectual property, they'll wither away. — Jared Polis

For years, members of Congress have heard from constituents who want them to protect the nation from crime, terrorism and intellectual property violation. They have not faced equally robust demands that online rights and freedoms be preserved. — Rebecca MacKinnon

In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well. — Mitch Kapor

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana. — Bill Gates

The name 'JSW', you will note, is not particularly imaginative. Nor is it the kind of thing you would imagine is incredible intellectual property. Yet, in 2014, JSW Steel told shareholders that it would pay Rs 125 crore a year to a firm entirely owned by Sajjan Jindal's wife, Sangita. In return, Sangita Jindal would graciously permit her husband to use the 'JSW' acronym, which JSW Steel insists her company, JSW Investments, owns. — Mihir S. Sharma

The British judiciary needs to support intellectual property. — James Dyson

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. — Alex Kozinski

Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others. — James Surowiecki

Piracy begins where creativity ends. — Kalyan C. Kankanala

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. — Lawrence Lessig

I still really love the world and the universe and the mythology of 'Halo.' If I was given control, I would really like to do that film. But that's the problem. When something pre-exists, there's this idea of my own interpretation versus 150 other people involved with the film's interpretation of the same intellectual property. — Neill Blomkamp

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When managing intellectual property, your goal should be to choose the terms and conditions that maximize the value of your intellectual property, not the terms and conditions that maximize the protection. — Carl Shapiro

Corporately contrived art product replaces inspired intellectual property with ineffectual poperty. — Vanna Bonta

All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she as extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity. — Lewis Hyde

For the West, the enemy was not "socialism" but capitalism. How to tame and subdue the polar bear, how to take over the talent, the science, the technology, how to buy out the human capital, how to acquire the intellectual property rights? — Michel Chossudovsky

Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer, I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. — Jim Allchin

Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development. — Craig Venter

The tax incentives are things the music business can emulate. If I own Yesterday by the Beatles and I go to a bank and try to borrow $10,000 and use that song as collateral, they wouldn't know what to do. They would run me out of the bank. Whereas if we get specialized people who know how to appraise the value of intellectual property like songs, catalogs and master recordings, they know how to put some type of value on it. They have this in Nashville and Los Angeles. New Orleans is just starting to get it. — Chris Thomas King

Did I say "republic?" By God, yes, I said "republic!" Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive. — Westbrook Pegler

The Industry's at war. I think it's about control. You can make all of the financial arguments that the industry has been shooting itself in the foot, but it is an industry built on a foundation of ownership and exploitation of intellectual property rights. — Don Rose

Anyone who knows anything should know you cannot take a master track of a recording and write another song over the top of it. You just can't do that. You can call it a tribute or whatever you want to call it, but it's against the law. That's a problem with some of the younger generation, they don't understand the concept of intellectual property and copyright. — Don Henley

Examples of selling of ideas are portrayed in consulting or paid advice, as the pricing of intellectual property is market driven. — Chuck Martin

Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today's richest men have made their money out of intellectual property. — Mark Getty

Do I have a problem with Larry Ellison buying Sun? No, that's part of the capitalist system. As soon as we go public we're for sale, that's part of the deal. And do I have a problem with him exercising his intellectual property rights? No, I don't have a problem with that. Would it be how we necessarily ran and operated? Obviously not. — Scott McNealy

I think the freedom to express one's views is more important than intellectual property. — Shepard Fairey

Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for being and being is infinite. — Jacques Maritain

From the business point of view - not to overstate it - intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance. — Esther Dyson

It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property; it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days. — Stewart Baker

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.
All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale. — Lev Grossman

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth - and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth - and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere. — Boris Johnson

There stood one, in physical proportion and stature commanding and exact - in intellect richly endowed - in natural eloquence a prodigy - in soul manifestly "created but a little lower than the angels" - yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave, - trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe that on the American soil, a single white person could be found who would befriend him at all hazards, for the love of God and humanity! Capable of high attainments as an intellectual and moral being - needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing to his race - by the law of the land, by the voice of the people, by the terms of the slave code, he was only a piece of property, a beast of burden, a chattel personal, nevertheless! — Anonymous

[ on the "tropicalization" of intellectual property laws ] To make the digital world join in the samba ... — Gilberto Gil

In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols. — Naomi Klein

The history of patents includes a wealth of attempts to reward friends of the government and restrict or control dangerous technologies. — James Boyle

Stealing things is everybody's problem. We [Apple Inc.] own a lot of intellectual property, and we don't like when people steal it. So people are stealing stuff and we're optimists. We believe that 80 percent of the people stealing stuff don't want to be; there's just no legal alternative. — Steve Jobs

The EU and the U.S. often work together to develop international standards. This is the case in fighting terrorism and transnational crime, advancing trade liberalization, and combating piracy and intellectual property violations. — John Bruton

If Patents are for Patients, Then Patients will be for Patents. — Kalyan C. Kankanala

People recognize intellectual property the same way they recognize real estate. People understand what property is. But it's a new kind of property, and so the understanding uses new control surfaces. It uses a new way of defining the property. — Michael Nesmith

IBM was granted a U.S. patent in 2012 on "Securing premises using surface-based computing technology." That's intellectual-property-lawyer-speak for a touch-sensitive floor covering, somewhat like a giant smartphone screen. The potential uses are plentiful. It would be able to identify the objects on it. In basic form, it could know to turn on lights in a room or open doors when a person enters. More important, however, it might identify individuals by their weight or the way they stand and walk. It could tell if someone fell and did not get back up, an important feature for the elderly. Retailers could learn the flow of traffic through their stores. When the floor is datafied, there is no ceiling to its possible uses. — Viktor Mayer-Schonberger

One of the movements we have developed is to say that, just as intellectual property rights protect the inventions of individuals, common rights are needed to protect the common intellectual heritage of indigenous peoples. These are rights that are recognized through the Convention on Biological Diversity. We are working to make sure that they become foundations of our jurisprudence. — Vandana Shiva

There is nothing called as cheap patents. Anything cheap is not worthwhile. — Kalyan C. Kankanala

While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet. — Rebecca MacKinnon

I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my walletand check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing's missing. — Janis Ian

Even at my biggest, I want to be writing for other artists. Even at my peak - the highest I can be as an artist - I always want to be keeping my creative juices flowing, keeping money in the bank, putting my intellectual property out there. — Keri Hilson

Quality IP comes from Quality effort. — Kalyan C. Kankanala

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. — Elon Musk

Knowledge is very vital in life's transformation and transition — Jaachynma N.E. Agu

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. — Thomas Jefferson

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WHEN NO ONE IS GETTING RICH After — Michael Becraft

1. Quality land and natural resources 2. Intellectual property, or good ideas about what should be produced 3. Quality labor with unique skills — Tyler Cowen

If a man is keeping an idea to himself, and that idea is taken by stealth or trickery-I say it is stealing. But once a man has revealed his idea to others, it is no longer his alone. It belongs to the world. — Linda Sue Park

They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival. — Jeremy Rifkin

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few. — John Adams

We're always looking for ways to extend all of our intellectual property. We've seen that's what happened with 'Harry Potter' and 'The Lord of the Rings.' — Jon Feltheimer

At heart, Pearson is in the intellectual property business, be it through publishing books or the 'Financial Times'. — Marjorie Scardino

For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity. — Vandana Shiva

Patent lawyers had only lately ascended to the aristocracy of the American bar. Trained not just as lawyers but as scientists or engineers, and working in small, specialized firms, they were at one time rudely dismissed by corporate lawyers as gearheads in green eyeshades, not good enough at science to be scientists, nor sufficiently talented at law to be real lawyers. Then came the intellectual property revolution of the 1990s, and these onetime outcasts found themselves ruling the last vibrant corner of the American economy. — Paul Goldstein

The first-sale doctrine reflects basic common sense - and follows from the logic of treating copyrights and other 'intellectual property' with no more protection than regular property. — Marvin Ammori

Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture. — Alex Kozinski

Forget land, buildings, or machines-the real source of wealth today is intelligence, applied intelligence. We talk glibly of "intellectual property" without taking on board what it really means. It isn't just patent rights and brand names; it is the brains of the place. — Charles Handy

I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues. — Linus Torvalds

Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google's products - Android, Google Docs - are shit. [Steve Jobs] — Walter Isaacson

Owning the intellectual property is like owning land: You need to keep investing in it again and again to get a payoff; you can't simply sit back and collect rent. — Esther Dyson

From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we'd be out of business. If it weren't protected, there'd be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there's a simpler reason: It's wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts your own character. — Walter Isaacson

We see films all the time, whether they have access to all kinds of intellectual property or artifacts, and the one thing that they don't get is story. So I think whether you're talking about a biopic or an action film or a science-fiction film that has all the CGI in the world, if you're not trying to connect with an audience, it doesn't really matter. — John Ridley

To take a stand on IP, India needs to have a stand first. — Kalyan C. Kankanala

For years, China expected foreign companies not to publicly voice their complaints about hacking or intellectual-property violations in order to protect their broader interests in the country. — Evan Osnos

I basically believe that until China stop stealing our intellectual property, and until they stop keeping our companies out that do good things, the amount we will gain from export jobs is minimized, and the amount we lose in middle class incomes is maximized. — Charles Schumer

My biggest concern about the market is the force that acts to drive down price, because I think that's destructive to authors as well as publishers. Our biggest battle is to underline the value of intellectual property. — Jonathan Galassi

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are theives. — Wendell Berry

Japan is a well-educated, technological society. It is a free society, protects intellectual property. — John Roos

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. — Lawrence Lessig

I am not in favour of the takeover of excellent and strategically important British companies by struggling foreign firms whose actions are fuelled by tax avoidance, and who want to asset-strip the intellectual property of the British company and then dismember it. — David Sainsbury, Baron Sainsbury Of Turville

The alternative to intellectual property is straightforward: intellectual products should not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. That means not owned by individuals, corporations, governments, or the community as common property. It means that ideas are available to be used by anyone who wants to. — Brian Martin

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. — Tim Berners-Lee

The Internet has been a blessing and a curse. The curse we know: A lot of people appropriating your intellectual property without paying for it. But I think it's important to realize the blessing of the Internet, which is that everybody has a voice and you can break through, even without a record company. — Gloria Estefan

The precursor of copyright law served to force the identification of the author so that he could be punished if he proved to be a heretic or a revolutionary — James Boyle

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. — Jared Polis

When any young director gets hired by a studio to do a $125 million film based on a preexisting piece of intellectual property, they're climbing into the meat grinder. And what you're coming out with on the other side is a generic, heavily studio-controlled pile of garbage that ends up on the side of Burger King wrappers. — Neill Blomkamp

I support copyright. I mean it is intellectual property, it is the thought process of someone and those things should always be protected. — Jeff Mills

'The Book of Air and Shadows' was born during a conference with an intellectual property lawyer on a particular afternoon in November of 2003. — Michael Gruber

I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance. — Oscar Wilde