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"Copyright is the oil for the 21st century"
Mark Getty, amerikansk finansmand og barnebarn til oliemagnaten J. Paul Getty
"Menneskehedens kulturelle og teknologiske udvikling, som vi kender den, er uløseligt forbundet med den frie og ubegrænsede ret til kopiering"
Morten Skriver, Dansk kunstner.
"Patents are a replay of colonization as it took place 500 years ago in a number of ways. Interestingly, even at that time, when Columbus set sail and other adventurers like him, they also set out with pieces of paper that were called the letters patent which gave the power to the adventurers to claim as property the territory they found anywhere in the world that was not ruled by white Christian princes.
Contemporary patents on life seem to be of a similar quality. They are pieces of paper issued by patent offices of the world that basically are telling corporations that if there's knowledge or living material, plants, seeds, medicines which the white man has not known about before, claim it on our behalf, and make profits out of it.
That then has become the basis of phenomena that we call biopiracy, where seeds such as the Basmati seed, the aromatic rice from India, which we have grown for centuries, right in my valley is being claimed as novel invention by RiceTec.
Neem, which we have used for millennia for pest control, for medicine, which is documented in every one of our texts, which my grandmother and mother have used for everyday functions in the home, for protecting grain, for protecting silks and woolens, for pest control, is treated as invention held by Grace, the chemical company.
This epidemic of piracy is very much like the epidemic of piracy which was named colonialism 500 years ago. I think we will soon need to name this round of piracy through patents as recolonialization as a new colonialization which differs from the old only in this - the old colonialization only took over land, the new colonialization is taking over life itself."
Dr. Vandana Shiva.
"Since Hardin, law and economics scholars have launched a crusade to expose
the evil of the commons - the evil, that is, of not propertizing. Progressive legal
scholars have responded in kind, exposing the perils of propertization.
With the rise of the Information Age, the flashpoint debates about property
have moved from land to information. The public domain is now the cause
celebre among progressive intellectual property and cyberlaw scholars,
who extol the public domain as necessary for sustaining innovation.
But scholars obscure the distributional consequences of the commons.
They presume a landscape where every person can reap the riches found in
the commons. This is the romance of the commons - the belief that because
a resource is open to all by force of law, it will indeed be equally exploited by all.
In practice, however, differing circumstances - including knowledge, wealth,
power, access, and ability - render some better able than others to exploit a commons."
Anupam Chander, Madhavi Sunder.
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