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theaters here in the United States, are already on sale in the streets of Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Windows XP was available for illegal use on the streets of Moscow two months before it was released in the U.S. by Microsoft. Every episode of Seinfeld is now available for download free to anyone with access to the Internet.”

Biden went on to talk about government’s responsibility to protect the property of its citizens. He said:

“When an American owns property, the government has the responsibility to protect that property from theft. When that property is an idea, it deserves our protection no less than if it were land or a personal object. Who among us would want to see expanded the efforts that have been made by the pirates against those who expend so much effort, the effort required to develop a new product, if the government were not prepared to punish those who would steal it?”

The statement is in stark contrast to one from Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, one of America’s founding fathers and the main author of the Declaration of Independence. In 1813, in a letter about patents, he wrote:

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Biden proposed legislation — which did not pass — that would have created chokepoints through which music and movies would have to pass, ensuring a corporate stranglehold on entertainment. It would have wedded files to the hardware on which they ran, making it a crime (punishable by five years in jail) to manipulate an unauthorised device

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