Intellectual Commons Quotes

“iI U.S. law, fair uses are stated quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. The defense is not ‘I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.’ It is ‘I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.’ When society hands out the right to the copyright holder, it carves out certain areas of use and refuses to hand over control of them.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“In U.S. law, fair uses are stated quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. The defense is not ‘I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.’ It is ‘I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.’ When society hands out the right to the copyright holder, it carves out certain areas of use and refuses to hand over control of them.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind : Annotated Edition