Seventy years ago, the U. S. government was extremely concerned about the possibility of Nazi scientists creating weapons that could destroy whole cities. President Roosevelt sent J. Edgar Hoover and his most trusted aides to radio stations and press conferences to tell physicists to “physicize harder.” And the result is history: without any federal funding or support of any kind, with nothing but laws that prevented anyone from thinking about non-socially-approved avenues of science, physicists heard the exhortation and created what lawyers everywhere had thought impossible: the atomic bomb.

Fifty years ago, the U. S. government was extremely concerned about the possibility of communist domination of space, leading to existential threats to the American way of life. President Kennedy immediately sent laws to Congress criminalizing any propulsion systems that couldn’t achieve near earth orbit. He also sent his brother and various other appointed bureaucrats to tell rocket engineers to “engineer harder.” And without any federal funding or support of any kind, engineers responded to the call and propelled Americans to the moon–an achievement impossible for any lawyer!

Now, the U.S. government is extremely concerned that de-monopolization of the entertainment industry will have adverse effects on the fortunes that support political campaigns–the greatest existential threat imaginable. And the response is to do what has worked so well before: to criminalize tedious scientific research that doesn’t support the political goals, and inform computer scientists that if they’d only work harder, they too could do things that lawyers have decided must be possible, even though they couldn’t do them. Because lawyers are smarter than god, and have innate knowledge of what’s possible and who’s not working hard enough to do it.