In Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy Lawrence Lessig argues that copyright is, critically important to a healthy culture. Properly balanced, he says, it is essential to inspiring certain forms of creativity. Without it, we would have a much poorer culture. With it, at least properly balanced, we create the incentives to produce great new works that otherwise would not be produced.

However, the costs of the “war” on “piracy,” is deemed to “threaten” the “survival” of certain important American industries. Peer- to- peer file sharing is the enemy in the “copyright wars.” Kids“stealing” stuff with a computer is the target. The costs of this war wildly exceed any benefit, at least when you consider changes to the current regime of copyright that could end this war while promising artists and authors the protection that any copyright system is intended to provide. He adds that:

I’ve tried to advance this view for peace by focusing on the costs of this war to innovation, to creativity, and, ultimately, to freedom. My aim in The Future of Ideas was to defend industries that never get born for fear of the insane liability that the current regime of copyright imposes. My subject in Free Culture was the forms of creative expression and freedom that get trampled by the extremism of defending a regime of copyright built for a radically different technological age.

In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will to them seem natural?.....What should we do if this war against “piracy” as we currently conceive of it cannot be won? What should we do if we know that the future will be one where our kids, and their kids, will use a digital network to access whatever content they want whenever they want it? What should we do if we know that the future is one where perfect control over the distribution of “copies” simply will not exist?

He adds that this war is especially pointless because there are peaceful means to attain all of its objectives— or at least, all of the legitimate objectives.

Artists and authors need incentives to create. We can craft a system that does exactly that without criminalizing our kids. The last decade is filled with extraordinarily good work by some of the very best scholars in America, mapping and sketching alternatives to the existing system. These alternatives would achieve the same ends that copyright seeks, without making felons of those who naturally do what new technologies encourage them to do.