Daily Inspiration Quote by Johannes Rau

“Certainly” is doing the heavy lifting here: Rau opens with a pre-emptive stamp of legitimacy, as if anticipating objections that copyright enforcement is petty, elitist, or hostile to creativity. The line reads like a statesman’s balancing act in miniature. It doesn’t celebrate copyright as a moral absolute; it frames it as an “interest” - a stakeholder’s claim in a crowded public sphere - and then grants that claim the modest but crucial status of being “justified.”

That phrasing is revealing. Rau avoids the language of natural rights or sacred ownership. Instead he speaks in the procedural tone of democratic governance, where competing interests must be recognized before they can be limited. The subtext: yes, creators and publishers deserve protection, but the debate is not over. “Asserting” copyright signals action, even aggression; it implies conflict, enforcement, a line drawn. By calling that assertion justified, Rau is trying to normalize the act of policing intellectual property at a time when digital distribution was making enforcement feel both necessary and politically fraught.

Context matters: a German head of state shaped by postwar constitutionalism and Europe’s rights-heavy legal culture would instinctively reach for legitimacy and proportionality rather than triumphalism. The sentence functions as rhetorical triage. It reassures rights-holders that the state takes their concerns seriously, while leaving room for the next clause that usually follows in speeches like this: the public interest, access to knowledge, fair use, education. It’s not a rallying cry; it’s a careful permission slip for regulation in a world where copying has become effortless and, increasingly, normal.