#property

Some people really trip on success or popularity. My friends would talk to me about that, about tripping on all this stuff, but you know what I tripped on? I started buying property. ↗

— Roy Ayers

#buying #friends #i #know #me

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man. ↗

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

#earth #how #intended #life #man

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of "the Haves" over the human rights of "the Have Nots" is inevitably called into serious question. ↗

— David Korten

#give #human #human rights #increasing #inequality

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property. ↗

— Cornel West

#obsessed #pleasure #power #property #selling

Property as compared with humanity, as compared with the red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place. ↗

— Woodrow Wilson

#american people #blood #compared #first #humanity

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes. ↗

— George Will

#imprisoned #more #offenses #property #than

What, but the rapacity of the only men who exercised their reason, the priests, secured such vast property to the church, when a man gave his perishable substance to save himself from the dark torments of purgatory. ↗

— Mary Wollstonecraft

#dark #exercised #gave #himself #his

Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properly with limits that are strict and even small. ↗

— G. K. Chesterton

#art

Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by lobbyists a) that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by the Green or White papers; or b) that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or c) that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to benefit consumers, who would now be able to “purchase culture by the sip rather than by the glass” in a pervasively monitored digital environment. In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be combined. Legislators’ statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash. To make things worse, the press was—in 1995, at least—clueless about these issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were paying attention—obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: pornography, online predation, more pornography. The lowbrow press stopped there. To be fair, the highbrow press was also interested in Internet legal issues (the regulation of pornography, the regulation of online predation) and constitutional questions (the First Amendment protection of Internet pornography). Reporters were also asking questions about the social effect of the network (including, among other things, the threats posed by pornography and online predators). ↗

— James Boyle

#copyright #ipr #property #business