" 'Information' is chaos; knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos; freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity." -Hakim Bey "...dissatisfaction itself became a commodity as soon as economic abundance could extend production to the processing of such raw materials." -Guy Debord "A culture is a tissue of exceptions, whose incoherence goes unnoticed by those involved in it." -unknown "Each and every sample is fragmented and bereft of prior meaning, kind of like a future without a past. They're given meaning only when represented in the assemblage of the mix. In this way, the DJ acts as the cybernetic inheritor of the improvisational tradition of jazz." -DJ Spooky "I think a picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world." - Robert Rauschenberg "Collage is the essential psychological identity of this century." -Charles Amirkhanian "Information stolen is information improved." -Jon Van Oast "Sample it, loop it, fuck it, eat it, and spit it out." -Pop Will Eat Itself "The only ism Hollywood really believes in is plagiarism." -Dorothy Parker "Plagiarism is neccesary, progress implies it." -Lautremont "Life can never be too disorienting." -Guy Debord & Gil J. Wolman "So we steal, so what, so far, so good, We're Robin Hoods for the good of the losers, the boozers, the ugly, the crazy, the drunks and the punks, the perverts, the lazy." -Pop Will Eat Itself, Preaching to the Perverted "[We point out] to our listeners that it's possible to think about our society and its mechanisms in a different way, and thereby not wholly succumb to its flickering promise of comfort and prosperity..." -Lloyd Dunn "Music is like glass, you shatter the glass, and then reassemble it." -Carl Stone "Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political." -Jaques Attali "...A process which uses given material, given signifiers (a text, a chord sequence), but which creates from these new signifiers, a new reality which is not given. The bricoleur may not even complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it." -Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind "The author has disappeared." -Michel Foucault, What is an Author? "The waste of the world becomes my art." -Kurt Schwitters "... the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one's own device." -Greil Marcus "If creativity is a field, copyright is the fence." -John Oswald "A good composer does not imitate; he steals." -Igor Stravinsky "You want the thing. You don't want the almost-thing." -Steve Steinski "The non-saleable goods such a free bulletin can distribute are previously unpublished desires and questions, and only their thorough analysis by others can constitute a return gift." -Isidore Isou "I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition. And really how can there be." -Gertrude Stein "'Ditto,' said Tweedledum. 'Ditto, ditto!' cried Tweedledee." -Lewis Carroll "We were the biggest knickers in town. Plagiarists extraordinaire." -Paul McCartney "No bird has ever uttered note, that was not in some first bird's throat; Since Eden's freshness and man's fall, no rose has been original." -Thomas Bailey Aldrich "When you're dry, copy anything, any sentence, and forge straight ahead." -Apollinaire "...there was little point in approximating to a reality by arduous academic exercise when we could just coopt fragments of reality and incorporate them in our works." -Arthur Danto "Our history is a history of being copied." -Patrick Brunet, lawyer for Pierre Vuitton "Maybe Capitalism has finally reached the stage of self-parody, unblushingly celebrating a house-of-cards as its highest achievement." -Matt Roth, The Baffler "The juxtaposition of two separate shots by splicing them together resembles not so much a simple sum of one shot plus another shot - as it does a creation." -Sergei Eisenstein "A DJ purist is not about any specific kind of music apart from his own. He is a purist about the art of DJing. The pure concept of DJing and DJ music is putting different things together by taking things out of one context and into a new one. Making new sense by misinterpreting the old, one could say." -Maximilian Lenz "One thing destroys another, things emerge, develop, and are destroyed, everywhere is like this... We should always be bringing forth new things. Otherwise what are we here for? What do we want descendants for?" -Mao "We never considered ourselves musicians. We're collage artists." -Future Sound of London "I don't mind getting sampled... it is an honor." -Jean-Jacques Perrey "White muscians were famous for going to Harlem and other Negro cultural centers literally to steal the black man's music, carrying it back across the color line into the Great White World and passing off the watered-down loot as their own original creations. Blacks, meanwhile, were ridiculed as Negro musicians playing inferior coon music." -Eldridge Cleaver "I've read all those books on those mantles, I tore out the pages I liked." -Mark Ramos-Nishita (aka Money Mark) "If Dr. Frankenstein had worked with paper instead of body parts, he'd have been a collage artist." -Winston Smith "Repetition is a form of change." -Oblique Strategy "I think something is gonna come out of this garbage world we're living in, where knowledge and information are becoming so abstract and the things that used to really work are sitting out there like big dinosaur carcasses, rusting. Something's gonna have to be made out of it that has some value." -Tom Waits "Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." -Mark Twain "Fragments are the only thing I trust." -Donald Barthelme "Who wants to be in the business of selling intellectual property, when everybody else is giving it away?" -Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, issue 816 "I want my music out there. Send it around, pass it around. I can keep makin' more." -Chuck D "It is my personal opinion that people who constantly whine about copyrights are total wussies who should aspire to be bureaucratic lawyers and bloodsucking insurance claim handlers. None of my work is copyrighted. You are welcome to steal anything and everything from this site without ever giving me the slightest bit of credit." -Bryan Livingston, from the FAQ of CoolText.com "I could point to elements in my stuff that I've picked and chosen from hundreds of cartoonists." -Chris Ware "Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble." - Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Notebook, May 23, 1903 "Copyright law is totally out of date. It is a Gutenburg artifact. Since it is a reactive process, it will probably have to break down completely before it is corrected." - Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1995 "Earlier generations of technology . . . have presented challenges to existing copyright law, but none have posed the same threat as the digital age." - John V. Pavlik, New Media Technology, 1996 "I wonder what kind of world is it where anyone can sing anyone else's song." - Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes, 1996 "...there is much opportunism in the air as people try to charge money for things that were previously free. It's a great scheme: instead of creating new goods and services, simply charge people for existing materials -- whether or not those materials are actually the stuff of culture, society, history, humanity, etc." - Manuel Labor, South to the Future "Property is theft." -Pierre-Joseph Proudhon "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 "I have a lot of trouble seeing where my style begins and where the styles of my influences end." -Dan Clowes "Art is communication - it's the ability to manipulate people. The difference with show business or politics is only that the artist is freer." -Jeff Koons "...inside our paper houses we worship idols of repetition and replication." -Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy "Only in a culture of the copy do we assign such motive force to the Original. What we intend by 'Original' these days is that which speaks to us in an unmediated way, an experience we seem to believe we have lost between ourselves, human to human." -Hillel Schwartz "All artists are thieves." -Linda Griffith "The street finds its own use for things." -William Gibson "Here we are in the age of communications, and never have we been more alienated, more lonely. We've become a society of screens, of layers that keep us from knowing the truth, as if the truth were unbearable, too much for us to deal with - like our feelings. So we deal with things through replications, through copying, through screens, through facsimiles, through fiction and faction." -Lynn Hershman "The collage technique ... is the most important innovation in the art of this century. Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades ... abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized." - Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. "Free Software is not intended to harm any actor of the software market like Microsoft, it's against the MARKET ITSELF" -Richard Stallman "Every text... is prone to 'contamination' of its meaning by adjacent and related text." -Jonathan Bignell, "Media Semiotics" "...in a culture that is based on the production of signs, the key point is to control the flow of symbolic representation (cultural capital) to the proper consumers." -Patrick Lichty, "Grasping at Bits" "I see cultural referents & associations being misapplied in pleasantly confusing ways. Anything is up for grabs. Anything is available for anyone to use." -David Byrne, "Strange Ritual" "I'm dying because I convinced myself that there was no order, that you could do whatever you liked with any text. I spent my life convincing myself of this... I'm dying because we were imaginative beyond bounds." -Diotallevi, in Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" "So our sensibilities slip easily into mediated-and-mediated music and, via sampling of voices and instruments, into double schizophonia, sounds split from their sources picked up and split again from the original recordings; a scratch guitar lick from a James Brown hit record blends with an 'ooooo' from an Aretha groove..." -Charles Keil, "Music Grooves" "[it is] sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is." -Lars Ulrich of Metallica "Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words' indeed. And who are you?" -Brion Gysin "The proliferation of the copy actually increases the demand for the original." -Mark Taylor "Never trust originality." -Umberto Eco "While 'channel surfing' and 'zapping' are not insignificant, one of the attractions of contemporary entertainment media is the luxury of passivity and consumption, rather than the 'work' involved in actively constructing a text for oneself made up of fragments of other texts..." -Jonathan Bignell, Media Semiotics "It's like if a bunch of people were over at my house, and I had a chocolate chip cookie and a cookie replicator, but I said to them all, 'Go buy your own fuckin' cookies. I signed a consent agreement.' Everyone would say, 'Don't be such a dork.'" -R.U. Sirius "Sharing is such a warm, cuddly, friendly word ... this is not sharing, it's duplicating." -Lars Ulrich of Metallica (referring to Napster) "The functioning of an economy depends on the definition of property rights and their enforcement" -Ronald Coase, winner of Nobel prize in Economics "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." -J.J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1754 "Let the producers be many and the consumers few." -Confucius "Everything was already smashed to pieces, and it was neccesary to build something new from the shards." -Kurt Schwitters "Consonant with Marx's call to change the world, Adorno felt the true task for music, its radical potential was its capacity to transform history." -Ultra Red "The fact is, music has never been a politically progressive force." -Joel Schalit, Punk Planet "Giving people credit for pioneering things, though, is something of a life's mission with critics of all persuasions. The reality is that everything is stolen from somebody else, even the first rocks that we banged together. And if you think of the American pioneers, weren't they also people who travelled great distances, at great risk, to steal land from someone else?" -Eugene Chadbourne "We're afraid of getting sued because it mentions a product name. We can't print the word NyQuil on the record, so we had to call the song something else besides "NyQuil Driver". But we can say it in the song all we want, we're just not allowed to [print it on the record]. We didn't want to get sued. . . I don't even know why NyQuil would be upset. Is it that we are suggesting that there is something wrong with their product? Or, is it that we would be stealing their customers away by getting them to buy records instead of cold medicine?" -John Linnell of They Might Be Giants, about the song 'AKA Driver' "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." - Woody Guthrie "If rock was conventionally modernist, its creators mining their souls in search of inspiration, then hip-hop and dance music, with their negation of traditional skills and rummage sale, frankly appropriative aesthetic, are pure postmodernism." -Tony Scherman, New York Times "Musical precedent is just a memory." - Don Joyce "Truly, there is something in the quality of a good translation that can never be captured in the original." - William Gibson "We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not." - William Gibson "Using the techniques we have presented here, we believe no public watermark-based scheme intended to thwart copying will succeed. Other techniques may or may not be strong against attacks. For example, the encryption used to protect consumer DVDs was easily defeated. Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content." - 'Lessons from the SDMI Challenge' "To create is divine, to reproduce is human." - Man Ray "If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants". - Isaac Newton "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." - James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822 "We Americans produce miserable ruins. While other empires leave behind the glories of their civilizations -- the Parthenon, the Colosseum -- we leave behind the detritus of our unsustainable enthusiasms. In our homes, most of us have a closet where we keep the remains of failed hobbies, the beer-making kit, for instance, as well as the binoculars and the Audubon guides. The dot-com moment was the same sort of thing on a massive scale." - David Brooks, New York Times Magazine "The world of mass cultural detritus... cannot be defended from the hypo-allergenic safety of a so-called distance. If you love trash, then you have to live it!" - Michael Bowen, Hermenaut Magazine "Property is at the base of it. Until you give up owning property, radical social change is impossible." - Marcel Duchamp "It is clearly not enough anymore to liberate billboards, hack corporate websites or smash store-front windows for these are merely superficial wounds inflicted upon a deeply entrenched, systemic organism. They have even become a form of institutional rebellion; cynically sanctioned and even celebrated by the very entities these tactics were originally deployed against. So what next then? If not these, then what other forms of guerrilla action do we - as able culture jammers and indignant protestors - have at our disposal? I believe that the next wave of anti-corporate activism will strike in the form of an information warfare. The most successful campaigns will initiate and deploy viral 'info-bombs' that disable targeted corporations by attacking them at their most vital (and exposed) points: share value and brand identity." - Stephen Marshall, Guerrilla News Network "Talent imitates, but genius steals." - T. S. Eliott "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, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispose himself of it." - Thomas Jefferson "The general rule of law is, that noblest of human productions-knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions and ideas - become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use." - Louis Brandeis "To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modeled, and no one talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it, and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire." - Don DeLillo, Underworld "I have a theory that every band fortunate enough to write songs that become a soundtrack for other people's lives ceases in time to own those songs. They have a responsibility to act as caretakers for that heritage." - Tom Robinson "The movie and record industry have a history of claiming that new technologies will bankrupt them. When video recorders were first introduced, they swore that they would go bankrupt if people could record movies. Now they make a lot of money selling video tapes. Now they swear that they will go bankrupt if we do not restrict the freedom of speech and the public's fair use rights. Why should we believe them this time around?" - Niels Ferguson, 'Censorship in Action' "The 'new, new economy' is not about information or the internet or connectivity or content or any of the other standard industry blather, it is about property, as it always is in a class society." - McKenzie Wark "Art is a synthesis of everything that came before it. Garry Trudeau told me that in 1982, just before he asked me to stop making my characters look like his, goddammit." - Berkeley Breathed "[A]rt is long, not infinite... One day we will use it up - unless we can learn to recycle it like any other finite resource." - Spider Robinson, "Melancholy Elephants" "As soon as you start recording situations and playing them back on the street you are creating a new reality." - William S. Burroughs "They are demanding that home cooking be prevented, it's ALL gotta be store bought now, every single meal... but so what, just keep eating, that's the important thing." - Don Joyce "Intertextuality, the migration of meanings from one context to another, is the catalyst of social change for the media maven." - David Cox, "The Lens of Images" "Samplers were once going to usher in a world of new sound, which soon became a world of James Brown. OK, nothing wrong with samplers, but more like we're at a loss to integrate this potential into a working palette. " - Tom Ellard of Severed Heads "It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of 'citations.'" - Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, 'Methods of Detournement' "If you're willing to bootleg music, you're willing to bootleg anything." - David J. Farber, Computer Science Dept, Univ. of Pennsylvania "There is no solution because there is no problem." - Marcel Duchamp "Every object of desire is a found object." - William Gibson, 'All Tommorrow's Parties' "... the more there are who say "ours", not "mine", by that much is each richer." - Dante "Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself." - Sir James Macintosh "Wherever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail." - Abraham Lincoln "Poetry can only be made out of other poems, novels out of other novels." - Northrop Frye "Resistance, it seems, cannot do without that which it nonetheless cannot bear." - Mark C. Taylor, 'Hiding' "We are all tatooed by the media, whose creation we have become." -Mark C. Taylor, 'Hiding' "Sample City is where we belong..." - The JAMMs "All the good parts have already been cast, and all we're doing is auditioning for the remake." - Connie Willis, 'Remake' "I'm a product of hip-hop culture, and a large part of the culture is that no sound or sample is sacred - you can flip anything and make it dope." - John Carluccio "I want to throw back to the audience everything the world throws back at me." - Hannah Wilke "An enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to their rights, and destructive to the common happiness of mankind." - Bill of Rights of Pennsylvania, 1776 "A lot of things have been made in a shoddy way; the planned obsolescence of commercial products is a mire that we all have to wade through." - Daniel Stupar "If you're pro-money, you're pro-sampling. This represents a second career for a lot of these guys." - Daniel Rubin, head of Sample Clearance Limited "If you're an artist involved in sampling, then great. It's just another way to do music. It's making something out of other things and recycling them into collages. For people who do it well, it's cool. But it's not something that I do.' - Lenny Kravitz "...Malaise mostly arrives in the way these things get talked about and consumed, reterritorialised so they reinforce the canon of 'great songs' and 'great artists'. Maybe it means that plunderphonics is officially over as an intrinsically subversive act and now should be seen as part of fan culture." - Drew Daniel of Matmos, discussing "bootlegs" "A standard for copy protection is as premature as a standard for teleportation." - Professor Edward Felten, Princeton University, computer security expert "Property, intellectual or personal, is the enemy of art." - John Ippolito "In principle, there is nothing wrong with wanting to make a living as an artist. What's wrong is the perception that our society's art market will ever make that possible for more than a token few." - John Ippolito "The invisible hand is a theory. Copyright is a theory. The benefit of propertyless art is a fact--a global, instantly accessible fact." - John Ippolito "To sell the products of artistic labor is to take away artists' power as the source of the gift." - Joline Blais "To disable the Internet to save EMI and Disney is the moral equivalent of burning down the library of Alexandria to ensure the livelihood of monastic scribes." - John Ippolito "Business, let it be said, is no more a villain than a lion whose metabolism needs gazelles. Companies are in the business of maximizing competitive performance in the market, and use of the commons simply represents an available resource, and frequently a path of least resistance." - David Bollier, "Silent Theft" "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me." - Leviticus 25:23 "Advertising is the 'culture' of a commodity civilization and the images are kept 'alive' as long as they turn a profit - usually about a year." - Lewis Hyde, "The Gift" "The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else's capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing." - Lewis Hyde, "The Gift" "A man who owns a thing is naturally expected to share it, to distribute it, to be its trustee and dispenser." - Bronislaw Malinowski, of the Trobriand Islanders "...You not only can have your cake and eat it too, you can't have your cake unless you eat it." - Lewis Hyde, "The Gift" "The problem is that wealth ceases to move freely when all things are counted and priced. It may accumulate in great heaps, but fewer and fewer people can afford to enjoy it." - Lewis Hyde, "The Gift" "Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity." - Marshall Sahlins, "Stone Age Economics" "God has excluded in general all increase of capital." - St. Ambrose "Words, thought, ideas, are never precisely my own; they are always borrowed rather than posessed." - Mark C. Taylor, "The Moment of Complexity" "Never original, fashion is always retro; creation is a recombinant process in which the old is resurrected and recycled to appear as new and the new is always haunted by the old." - Mark C. Taylor, "The Moment of Complexity" "While I cannot write without the words of others, the word of the other cannot survive if it is not resurrected in writing that appears to be my own." - Mark C. Taylor, "The Moment of Complexity" "Making good use of the things that we find, Things that the everyday folks leave behind." - The Wombles "Pick up the pieces and make them into something new, is what we do!" - The Wombles "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." - Woody Guthrie songbook, c. late-1930s "Collage is not just a technique, but rather, 'a philosophical attitude, and aesthetic position that can suffuse virtually any expressive medium.'" - Kembrew McLeod, quoting B. Hopkins "I only love pieces of things that I hate." - Throwing Muses, "Vicki's Box" "The role of the forger, of the unknown maker of unauthenticated goods, is emblematic of electronic culture. And when the forger is done honor for his craft and no longer reviled for his acquisitiveness, the arts will have become a truly integral part of our civilization." - Glenn Gould "There is much to be said for stealing the enemy's signs but the process of converting them from one meaning to another is often a costly and bloody business." - Michael Humphries, 'I Am A Critical Mass' "What a breath of fresh air to find an "indie rock" band who pretty much throw all the predictable stuff out the window, leaving only originality." - Aquarius Records "It's about using the sample in a way that it doesn't directly rip off the sound of the original... It's a shame that has been done as often as it has. It means that the price of buying samples is enormous. We think just paying respects in the sleeve is probably enough but the courts disagree." - Darren Feltmann of The Avalanches "I know what I think is fair in terms of sampling and clearance. I think it is fair to clear sizeable usages but you can't clear 8 samples in a song. That's just impossible, you can't give everyone 50%. If people were more reasonable I would clear everything but it's all about lawyers and what they think they can get. It's nothing to do with any kind of musicology." - DJ Shadow "I think sampling is really a continuation of the way music has always been made. The way traditional musicians make a melody of their own -- they listen to music all their life that influences that." - Amon Tobin "One's words remain nonsense (mere sounds or markings) until supplemented by another's assent (or appropriate action). And this assent, too, remains dumb until another (or others) lend it a sense of meaning." - Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self "Every text builds itself as a mosaic of quotations, every text is an absorption and transformation of another text". - Julia Kristeva "Anybody who steals our ideas inspires us to create something new that people want to steal as well. But stealing is the wrong word here, it was already yours to begin with." - Social Fiction "The symbols of retrenchment & renewal thus function as authorless texts, to be interpreted and re-interpreted across time and culture. And as such a diffusion takes place so are the original causes defused." - Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self "But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence...illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness." - Ludwig Feuerbach "Notions of origin have no place in electronic reality." - Critical Art Ensemble "If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it." - Motion Picture Association of America, "What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship" "Regardless of the legal tactic they choose, the impossibly contradictory message sent out by the producers of these iconic products is the same: we want our brands to be the air you breathe in - but don't dare exhale." - Naomi Klein, "No Logo" "The peculiar advantage of photo-montage lies in the fact that everything which has been cut out keeps its familiar photographic appearance. We are still looking first at things and only afterwards at symbols." - John Berger, "The Political Uses of Photo-Montage "If knowledge does not have owners, then intellectual property is a trap set by neo-liberalism." - Hugo Chavez "A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property." - Gilberto Gil "I always found intellectual property boring. Among economists, intellectual property isn't considered one of the noble questions." - José Serra, former Brazilian Minister of Health "[Tropicalismo] was no longer a mere submission to the forces of economic imperialism, but a cannibalistic response of swallowing what they gave us, processing it, and making it something new and different. We saw the cultivating of new habits and manners from the outside as a way of nourishing ourselves, not just intoxicating ourselves." - Gilberto Gil "Manuever between pastiche and mismatch." - Andrew Boyd, Life's Little Deconstruction Book, item 36 "Reduce meaning to a hodgepodge of signifiers." - Andrew Boyd, Life's Little Deconstruction Book, item 47 "Play with texts while an oppressive social system goes about its business." - Andrew Boyd, Life's Little Deconstruction Book "I only had the capacity to play five things at once, but sometimes borders can provide you with freedom." - Eric Morriss