On today’s podcast interview, Mark Helprin makes the case for the importance of intellectual property rights — he defends copyrights and criticizes people who download music illegally. Helprin is an accalimed novelist, but his new book Digital Barbarism makes an explicit argument: “Should the foes of copyright prevail, civilization, though it will survive, will, even if they don’t know it, change radically and not for the better,” he writes. “You cannot claim to protect the little man while simultaneously liquidating the few rights by which he protects himself against the whiplash of the mass.”