Science & Tech Quote by Suzanne Fields

Fields goes for the jugular by refusing to treat digital copying as a quirky new kind of “sharing” and insisting on an older, uglier word: steal. That choice isn’t just moral condemnation; it’s rhetorical engineering. If you accept her framing, the argument about copyright exceptions, fair use, or new distribution models becomes beside the point. The real crisis is character formation: law as a teacher, culture as a training ground, adolescence as the window when habits harden.

The subtext is a generational indictment. “Young people” are positioned less as rational consumers navigating a messy transition to the internet era and more as apprentices being schooled in vice by permissive norms. It’s a classic culture-war move: shift the debate from policy (what should be legal, what business models work) to virtue (what kind of citizens we’re producing). By claiming “current law permits” copying and sharing, she also implies institutional negligence: lawmakers, courts, and perhaps tech companies are depicted as collaborators in eroding the concept of property.

Context matters here: this is the post-Napster, early broadband panic, when entertainment industries and commentators were locked in a fight over what the internet would be - a library, a marketplace, or a free-for-all. Fields’ intent is to foreclose nuance. If copying equals stealing, then enforcement becomes not just economic protectionism, but a moral rescue mission. The line works because it weaponizes parental anxiety: the fear that the screen isn’t only entertaining kids, it’s teaching them who they’re allowed to become.