Leadership Quote by Dan Glickman

A politician’s sentence that tries to sound like a moral truism is really a policy grenade with the pin already pulled. Dan Glickman’s line frames copyright not as corporate control but as collective labor: “millions of people who make them.” That phrase is doing the heavy lifting. It strategically widens the circle beyond studios and labels to include grips, editors, costume designers, songwriters, and assistants - the vast invisible workforce audiences rarely picture when they hit “download.” By shifting the beneficiary from shareholders to workers, the argument seeks emotional legitimacy: opposing stricter enforcement starts to look like opposing paychecks.

The subtext is equally pointed: piracy is not merely a technical violation, it’s theft, and “unlawfully distribute” folds sharing into the same moral category as stealing. That’s a deliberate compression, designed to make messy debates about access, fair use, and new distribution models feel like excuses. It’s also a way of delegitimizing the internet’s early cultural ethos that copying can be frictionless and communal.

Context matters because Glickman is a political operator, not an artist. The line reads like the public-facing rhetoric of an industry coalition: simple, defensible, and built for soundbites. It anticipates backlash against enforcement by borrowing the language of labor rights, even as the real fights often hinge on who has leverage in contracts, who captures residuals, and how much of “creative works” is controlled by intermediaries. The quote works because it weaponizes sympathy for creators to justify power for rights-holders.