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.
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
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 in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
If NATURE has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea... No one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. 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.
Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.
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.
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.
In the old days, you would have one lawyer to handle everything: speeding tickets, buying a house, contracts, litigation, real estate, copyrights, leasing, entertainment, intellectual property, forensic accounting, criminal offenses... the list goes on. Now, you have to have a separate lawyer for each one of those categories!
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.
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.
I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others.
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 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.
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.
Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.
I am a strong believer that intellectual property rights need to be protected.
People have to respect intellectual property.
I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.
I wish to note that intellectual property theft by a government represents the very essence of organized crime.
I don't hate anybody. The Winklevi aren't suing me for intellectual property theft. They're suing me because for the first time in their lives, the world didn't work the way it was supposed to for them.
or simply:
