tianjara.net | Andrew Harvey's Blog

From Cory Doctorow and the start of Little Brother (pg 5).

Finally, let's look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It's how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited retelling of Star Wars, which I'd just seen in the theater. Now that the Internet the world's most efficient copying machine is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There's no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I'd be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mixtapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I'd have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could. There's no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than piracy ever did. The record industry's ridiculous holy war against filesharers (more than 20,000 music fans sued and counting!) exemplifies the absurdity of trying to get the foodcoloring out of the swimming pool. If the choice is between allowing copying or being a frothing bully lashing out at anything he can reach, I choose the former.