Success Quote by Hilary Rosen

Copyright, Rosen reminds us, is supposed to be a lever, not a trophy. Her line cuts against the collector mentality that sometimes defines corporate media: acquire rights, lock them down, litigate anyone who gets curious. She’s arguing for a more transactional, almost commons-adjacent view of ownership: if you’re not actively exploiting a work, you’re not protecting creativity, you’re just warehousing it.

The subtext is a critique of scarcity as a business strategy. When she says nobody wants to hold “stuff in a vault,” she’s not being naive about profit; she’s reframing profit as downstream of circulation. Popularity isn’t an accident in her framing, it’s the product. A song, film, or recording doesn’t become valuable because it’s rare; it becomes valuable because it’s everywhere enough to matter. That’s a direct shot at the instinct to treat access as loss, especially in industries shaped by piracy panics and defensive licensing.

Context matters: Rosen’s career sits at the intersection of entertainment commerce and policy debates where copyright often gets sold as moral righteousness. Her phrasing demystifies it. Copyright is not sanctity; it’s strategy. And strategy fails when it forgets that culture runs on frictionless repetition: sharing, sampling, quoting, rewatching. The twist is quietly radical: exclusivity isn’t the point of copyright, attention is. Ownership only “works” when it’s willing to be seen.