Ed Meese on Copyrights

According to former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese in "Copyright is Copyright is Copyright," if John Adams and James Madison were alive today, they would be alarmed to see ordinary citizens using today's extraordinary information technology to shoplift copyrighted intellectual property from movie studios:

As John Adams warned, "The moment an idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence." I fear that moment has come.

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If James Madison was right -- that "government is instituted to protect property of every sort," if this objective is "the end of government," and "that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own" -- then these movie studios are just doing what any potential theft victim would do.

They are protecting property that is rightfully theirs.