Gary Varga

“I want to convince you that intellectual property is important, that it is something that any informed citizen needs to know a little about, in the same way that any informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment, or civil rights, or the way the economy works. I will try my best to be fair, to explain the issues and give both sides of the argument. Still, you should know that this is more than mere description. In the pages that follow, I try to show that current intellectual property policy is overwhelmingly and tragically bad in ways that everyone, and not just lawyers or economists, should care about. We are making bad decisions that will have a negative effect on our culture, our kids’ schools, and our communications networks; on free speech, medicine, and scientific research. We are wasting some of the promise of the Internet, running the risk of ruining an amazing system of scientific innovation, carving out an intellectual property exemption to the First Amendment. I do not write this as an enemy of intellectual property, a dot-communist ready to end all property rights; in fact, I am a fan. It is precisely because I am a fan that I am so alarmed about the direction we are taking.”
― Anonymous

“Defeasible beliefs provide the provisional certainty necessary to navigate an uncertain world.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“When one is busy and absorbed in one's work, the very absorption affords great delight; but when one has withdrawn one's hand from the completed masterpiece, the pleasure is not so keen.”
― Seneca, Letters From A Stoic: Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium (Illustrated. Newly revised text. Includes Image Gallery + Audio): All Three Volumes

“The content industries like to portray fair use as a narrow and grudging defense against an otherwise valid case for copyright infringement—as if the claim were, “Yes, I trespassed on your land, which was wrong, I admit. But I was starving and looking for food. Please give me a break.” This is simply inaccurate. True, fair use is asserted as “an affirmative defense”; that is the way it is brought up in a copyright case. But 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.”
― Anonymous