Life & Wisdom Quote by John Perry Barlow

Barlow is doing what he always did best: refusing the tidy moral panic that turns a new technology into a single, prosecutable story. The “They” here is deliberately vague but politically pointed - lawmakers, legacy media companies, and the enforcement ecosystem that springs up around them. By calling out what “they seem to have forgotten,” he frames the crackdown on peer-to-peer not as prudence but as a relapse: society learned something about the internet, then conveniently unlearned it when incumbents felt threatened.

The line that really bites is “the only purpose.” That’s the rhetorical trap he’s exposing: once a tool is defined solely by its worst use, regulation becomes easy and civil liberties become collateral. Barlow counters with a different origin story for P2P, one grounded in legitimacy: distribution of material that “ought to be in public domain,” and often already is. The word “ought” matters. He’s not only making a legal claim; he’s making a cultural argument about memory, access, and the slow theft of the commons through overlong copyright terms and aggressive licensing.

This sits squarely in the late-90s/early-2000s copyright wars - Napster-era debates where “piracy” became a catch-all epithet for networked sharing. Barlow’s subtext is that the public domain is not a dusty legal category; it’s an infrastructure for democratic culture. Treat P2P as inherently criminal, and you don’t just punish pirates. You impoverish the circulation of what belongs to everyone, and you let private ownership masquerade as public interest.