Art & Creativity Quote by Hilary Rosen

A corporate warning dressed up as concern for the little guy, Hilary Rosen's line captures a very particular late-90s/early-2000s panic: the music industry realizing the internet had slipped past its gatekeepers. The phrasing is telling. "Unauthorized use" frames sharing as a kind of trespass, not a new consumer behavior or technological inevitability. It borrows the moral weight of theft without having to argue the messier economics of copying, pricing, or access.

The sentence also performs a strategic identity shuffle. Rosen speaks from an industry power position, yet she foregrounds "artists in the music community" to make enforcement sound like solidarity. That's the subtext: if you resist stricter controls, you're not challenging corporations, you're harming creators. It's a rhetorical move that collapses very different stakeholders (labels, executives, working musicians) into one sympathetic bloc. "Really creating a problem" is deliberately vague, too: it implies widespread damage while sidestepping specifics about who is losing money, how much, and why the existing business model can't adapt.

Context does a lot of the work here. MP3s weren't just a format; they were a symbol of frictionless distribution, Napster-era peer-to-peer networks, and a sudden shift in bargaining power from labels to listeners. Rosen's intent is less to persuade skeptics about ethics than to justify a policy response: lawsuits, DRM, and tighter control over digital pipes. The line reads like the industry trying to win the cultural argument before it can win the legal one.