Time & Perspective Quote by Cory Doctorow

Doctorow’s line lands like a polite slap to an industry that can’t stop mistaking enthusiasm for felony. “Put simply” is the tell: he’s stripping away the euphemisms - “piracy,” “theft,” “lost sales” - to expose a basic relationship question. Do you see readers as collaborators in a cultural ecosystem, or as potential criminals to be managed? By framing readers as “partners,” he’s not offering kumbaya sentiment; he’s describing how attention actually moves online. The people who share, remix, quote, and recommend are not marginal. They’re the distribution network, the word-of-mouth engine, the unpaid marketing department with better taste than your ad buy.

The subtext is an indictment of DRM-first thinking: lock it down, sue the leakage, punish the users most likely to love you. Doctorow’s rhetorical move is to collapse a moral argument into a business one. “There is no future” isn’t a plea for kindness; it’s a forecast. Treat your biggest fans like suspects and they’ll behave like suspects - or more likely, they’ll leave. The “crooks” repetition is deliberate, bordering on sarcastic: he’s mimicking the scolding posture of publishers, labels, and studios who equate copying with depravity, then showing how self-defeating that posture is.

Context matters: Doctorow comes out of the early internet battles over copyright maximalism, DMCA takedowns, and tech that assumes users are adversaries. His intent is to reframe the fight from legality to legitimacy: cultural markets run on trust, and trust is incompatible with default suspicion.