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 re-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.
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.
(Thanks, Paula!)
Update: Gwen points out that Flock of Seagulls’s debut album contains the phrase.
Update 2: Swamp Thing adds this article from 2000 that actually contains the phrase, “You can click, but you can’t hide.”
Update 3: BUT YOU STILL SUCK graphic from Neil’s World
Update 4: Amy sez, “in Hunter S. Thompson’s classic 1971 novel ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, Hunter’s character has a paranoid vision that references the phrase.”