When I ‘steal’ a program I’m exercising my right to culture, which isn’t anyone’s private property. The programs I ‘steal’ don’t earn me any money; on the contrary, they make me waste time. I don’t derive any material benefit from them. Culture, the product of intelligence and sensibility, is something that should circulate freely, with no charge; it can’t be anyone’s private property, because the mind isn’t anyone’s private property. If I was able to read in the mind of an unknown Texan a procedure that let me use his program, that means something. If I write a story and then destroy it because I feel like it’s not ‘mine’ (and a long time afterwards I find material proof that it wasn’t ‘mine’), that means something. A text I’ve written isn’t ‘mine’ because I own it; it’s ‘mine’ in the way a child might be ‘mine’.

We ought to find a system that would allow writers to survive without needing to traffic in copyright; we ought to destroy this rotten system of blood-sucking publishers, of books as objects, of penalties for photocopying or pirating work. It’s true: a writer who hits on something that matches popular taste can get rich overnight (unlikely in this country, of course), and writers of software even more so. But as we all know, becoming rich like that is also a way of becoming poor, and anyway, if people want to be part of that system, fine, I’ll leave them to it.