Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.

Politics is that rare sport where the amateur contest is actually more interesting than the professional.

As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.

Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses--like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work--that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.

But it is as silly to think about peer-to-peer as applying just to music as it would have been to think about the Internet as applying just to pornography. Whatever the initial use of the technology, it has nothing to do with the potential of the architecture to serve many other extremely important functions.

Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid.