In this article, the author provides a spirited defense of librarians' sometimes controversial role in public and legislative controversies over a wide array of topics including fair use, Internet filters, and digital rights to intellectual property. She argues that librarians cannot solve the copyright conundrum for their universities by themselves. Indeed, individual faculty and even individual universities cannot turn this tide alone. Effective change will not occur until scholars themselves, as a group, reclaim control of their intellectual output, and it will take a critical mass of them deciding to do so before that will happen.