"According to the principles of homeopathy, you can take a small amount of a drug and dilute it with water to such an extent that not a single molecule of the drug is left. Even though what you now have is essentially distilled water, it still retains the "memory" of the drug it once contained and is effective in treating a variety of medical conditions. The homeopathic remedy for copyright law suggests that every byte is sacred that my bitstream and yours aren't equivalent even though they may be identical. This type of thinking may work in the short run, but as the legal system tries to grapple with the increasing fluidity of information in the Internet age, surely it will someday fail."