The title of this post is an insightful quote from Kate Schwartz, a high school student who participated in a recent seminar on piracy including U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. As the LA Times reports,

During a daylong UCLA seminar featuring Gonzales, students peppered speakers with tough questions about the real effect of piracy. Some even suggested that government should focus more on tackling poverty and improving education than on jailing kids who download movies, music and software.

I'm with the students. Is Internet piracy such a big crime against society that the US Attorney General should be busy promoting the entertainment industries' agenda? Mike Godwin sarcastically points out in "The New Legal Panic over Copyright" (Copyfights Eds Theierer and Crews) that

the general trend, at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990's, was for software to be relatively unencumbered by copyright protection, if not outright unprotected. Now, as we know, Microsoft since the 1980's has utterly collapsed in the absence of strong copyright protection. The company has gone down the economic drain, and they have our sympathy. (179)

Microsoft managed to survive, despite the piracy of Windows and Office (who doesn't know someone who had an unlicensed copy of one or the other?). I'm sure that the entertainment industries will survive another day without including the attorney general in their advocacy campaign.