Justice & Law Quote by Patrick Leahy

Leahy’s sentence is built like a political pressure valve: it releases just enough steam from both sides to keep the machine from exploding. He opens by affirming the moral baseline - “the rights of copyright holders need to be protected” - a nod to creators, studios, and the industries that frame infringement as theft. That clause isn’t argument so much as credentialing. It signals: I’m not here to burn down the system.

Then comes the pivot word that does the real work: “but.” In Washington, “but” is where a coalition gets stitched together. Leahy isn’t rejecting enforcement; he’s rejecting excess, and he chooses “draconian” for a reason. It’s a loaded, old-world adjective that casts proposed measures as authoritarian overreach, the kind of thing a liberal democracy should be embarrassed to deploy in defense of a business model.

The phrase “remedies that have been suggested” also carries strategic distance. He doesn’t name names, which avoids a direct fight with powerful rights-holders while still warning them. The subtext is clear: your wish list - site blocking, sweeping liability, aggressive surveillance, cutting off payment rails - risks collateral damage to innovation, speech, and due process.

The closer, “create more problems than they would solve,” is classic legislative pragmatism: not ideology, consequences. In the post-Napster, post-DMCA era (and later SOPA/PIPA battles), this is a senator reading the room: the internet is now essential infrastructure, and laws that treat it like a controllable pipeline tend to backfire politically and technologically.