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Given that you'll never be able to prevent copying, the question is, what can you do to minimize it? What can you do to make consumers happy enough with legitimate use of the system that they'll be willing to pay for it?

In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.

There's no harm being a copycat. If someone else is doing a good job, copy. It's free.

I don't accept what people say. I took something to be copied recently, to be enlarged and blown up, and they said it couldn't be done, and I went somewhere five minutes away, and they did it.

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

You can't really copy what I do because I don't do anything.

Even if it was a difficult operation to copy a song, it only takes one person to do it. After that the spread of the song via the Internet or other means of propagation is only limited by the honesty of the users.

The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.

I borrow bits from everyone.