Wealth & Money Quote by Hilary Rosen

Napster isn’t being indicted here for breaking a business model; it’s being framed as breaking a moral order. Hilary Rosen’s phrasing is surgical: she shifts the argument away from the messy, sympathy-draining question of millionaire musicians “losing money” and onto the cleaner, more prosecutable claim that a company is free-riding on someone else’s product. “Using the music to make money for themselves” turns peer-to-peer sharing into something more legible to courts and the public: not kids swapping songs, but a middleman converting culture into revenue without permission.

The subtext is strategic triage. In the early Napster era, the industry’s biggest PR problem wasn’t copyright law; it was credibility. If the fight looks like rich artists and major labels squeezing fans, you lose the room. Rosen instead makes it about unjust enrichment and accountability: who gets to monetize art, and under what rules. The line “more relevant than whether or not I’m losing money” is a rhetorical feint, almost an inoculation against accusations of greed. It’s also a reminder that she’s speaking as an industry executive, not a performer: her authority rests on stewardship of rights, not personal hardship.

Context matters: this was the moment when the internet’s “information wants to be free” ethos collided with late-90s corporate consolidation and a CD economy built on scarcity. Rosen’s intent is to reassert scarcity’s legal machinery, but she’s savvy enough to argue it as ethics first, balance sheet second.