Quotes for the day...

I'm putting together some appropriate quotes for the prologue of my novel. Here are two of my favorites, from both sides of the issue.

First, from Jack Valenti, past president of the MPAA, during testimony in 1982 about the Sony Betamax video recorder:

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

And from the admirable Lawrence Lessig, from his book Freedom Culture (available as hardcopy or free electronic file).

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.