Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

Lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?

"Writing" is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.

A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.

I'm focused on solving the problem that would make it plausible for gov't to get back to solving real problems.

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.

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.