The view behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is that if you don’t perfectly protect the world from bad code, it would be the end of intellectual property. If one copy of a work is unencrypted and put on the Web, there’d be no further demand for that product anywhere. As a factual matter, that’s just false. Napster didn’t result in the end of the CD market. In fact, many people argue that it increased the sales of CDs.

More fundamentally, it’s just skewed in its way of dealing with technologies that can be used for both good and bad purposes. There is a technology called the gun, which a number of children every day are killed with. But Smith & Wesson doesn’t shake in its boots waiting for the FBI to come knocking at its door, because we have adopted the view that this technology has both good and bad uses, and rather than prosecuting the technology we’ll prosecute the bad users. But in the context of copyright, if the technology has good and bad uses, the good ones don’t matter.