Daily Inspiration Quote by Johannes Rau

Rau’s sentence is doing the quiet work of statesmanship: acknowledging a moral panic without turning it into a crusade. He opens by staging empathy as a political act - “I understand the worries of many” - and then widens the frame beyond “this auditorium,” a classic leader’s move that flatters the room while signaling he’s speaking for a broader public. The parenthetical aside is telling: it suggests he’s addressing an expert crowd (likely culture, media, or law) but refuses to let it become an insiders-only conversation.

The real charge sits in the metaphor of a “lowered threshold.” Rau isn’t claiming technology makes people evil; he’s arguing it makes wrongdoing easier to commit and, crucially, easier to excuse. “Without the slightest embarrassment” shifts the problem from legality to shame - from courts to culture. That’s the subtext: enforcement alone won’t restore respect for authorship if the social cost of copying has evaporated. When copying is frictionless, conscience gets frictionless too.

Contextually, this reads as a late-1990s/early-2000s European anxiety about the internet’s early mass adoption: Napster-era piracy, cheap CD burners, and the dawning realization that copyright had become a daily behavior rather than a niche legal category. Rau’s intent is calibrated: he’s not demonizing users, but he is preparing the ground for policy by framing infringement as a technology-shaped habit. It’s a rhetorical bridge between cultural producers demanding protection and citizens who increasingly experience “protected works” as infinitely reproducible files.