modern conceptions of intellectual property derive both from the organization and financing of book production and from the uniformity and fixity of text that characterized the printed book...If the author, like the text, becomes dispersed or multivocal, how does society fairly assign legal, commercial, and moral rights?
George P. Landow in Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
If the work of the author no longer carries with it definite physcial properties as a unique original, as a book in a definite form, then the author's rights too grow more tenuous, more indistinct.
- Michael Heim, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987
When almost any kind of "information" in almost any medium can now be represented and processed with digital electronics, the range of things that can be considered "intellectual property" is mind-boggling. Perhaps the briefest statement of the need to redefine terms was made by Harlan Cleveland in the May/June 1989 issue of Change magazine: "How can 'intellectual property' be 'protected'? The question contains the seed of its own confusion; it's the wrong verb about the wrong noun.
George Landow quoting Steven W. Gilbert, Information Technology, Intellectual Property, and Education," EDUCOM Review 25 (Spring 1990) in Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
Copyright attorney Patricia Lyons suggests...that, as "the manipulation of text in order to abstract what may be termed 'knowledge' increases, "it is evident that notions of 'fair use' developed in a print world may no longer be relevant."
Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, The University of Michigan Press, 1995
One of the main advantages of having this book in a hypertext format would be to provide readers with the possibility of linking directly to supplementary reading material for issues of special interest to each individual reader. Unfortunately this would be mostly impossible to do given current copyright restrictions, since the relevant literature on hypertext has so many different copyright holders that nobody could acquire all the relevant permissions.
- Jakob Nielsen in his Preface to Hypertext and Hypermedia, Academic Press Professional, 1990