McLir Blog

Friday, February 11, 2005

Who did MPAA rip off "You can click but you can't hide" from?

The MPAA's new catchphrase "You can click, but you can't hide" is a remix of the famous phrase "You can run, but you can't hide," which was popularized by intellectual property abolishionist and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow in a song he wrote for the Grateful Dead. He might have gotten it from The Road Warrior. The original phrase seems to have come from the boxer Joe Louis.

So there you have it: the MPAA has ripped, mixed and burned a phrase out of the cultural commons -- they appropriated it, reversed the meaning it had been imbued with by its copyfighting popularizer, and put it out there, not even bothering to credit Lewis or Barlow. Sly old MPAA. Link

We can run,
But we can't hide from it.
Of all possible worlds,
We only got one:
We gotta to ride on it.
Whatever we've done,
We'll never get far from what we leave behind,
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can't hide.
Oh no, we can't hide.
Patrick McComb at 5:03 PM
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