For the single point that is lost in this war on pirates is a point
that we see only after surveying the range of these changes. When you
add together the effect of changing law, concentrated markets, and
changing technology, together they produce an astonishing conclusion:
Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of
the development of our culture than now.
Not when copyrights were perpetual, for when copyrights were
perpetual, they affected only that precise creative work. Not when only
publishers had the tools to publish, for the market then was much more
diverse. Not when there were only three television networks, for even
then, newspapers, film studios, radio stations, and publishers were
independent of the networks. Never has copyright protected such
a wide range of rights, against as broad a range of actors, for a term
that was remotely as long. This form of regulation—a tiny regulation
of a tiny part of the creative energy of a nation at the founding—is
now a massive regulation of the overall creative process. Law plus
technology plus the market now interact to turn this historically
benign regulation into the most significant regulation of culture that
our free society has known.