One of my favourite essays is George Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'. In it, he analyses not only how thought corrupts language, but also how language corrupts thought. 'A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better,' Orwell writes.

Cue representatives of the Recording Industries Association of America, whose use of language would make an excellent Orwellian case study. Like all lobby groups, the RIAA's aim is to protect its members' vested interests against present and future threats to their livelihoods. At the moment, the sharing of music files across the internet is deemed by them to be such a threat. Behind the RIAA stands the MPAA - the Movie Producers' Association of America - which is likewise transfixed by the thought that what Napster did for recorded music, the net might eventually do for recorded movies.

The RIAA and MPAA are formidable bodies. They have oodles of money and use it well. They employ the best lawyers. They contribute on a stupendous scale to the electoral funds of US politicians. These behind-the-scenes subventions are, however, not sufficient to ensure that Congress does the lobbyists' bidding, for no self-respecting politician will stand up and say 'I'm voting to extend copyright because last fall Disney contributed $36,000 to my campaign expenses'. No: he needs rhetoric to provide high-flown justification for doing the studios' bidding.

The function of this rhetoric is two-fold. First, it must link how the politician is minded to vote with concepts seen as unquestionably good in the public mind. And second, it must provide a way of associating the opposition with concepts that are anathema to all decent people.

Which is where Orwell comes in. The first thing the RIAA/MPAA have to establish is that any unauthorised copying of their materials is a crime against the natural order. The aim is to signify a moral equivalence between sharing a track from a CD with a friend and stealing your neighbour's goods and handing them round. To achieve this, the RIAA/MPAA have to plant in the public mind the idea that cultural products (movies, recorded music, books) are 'property' in the same sense that your house and its contents constitute property. And since property, such as Motherhood and Apple Pie, is unquestionably a Good Thing, anything that infringes upon it must, by the same token, be Evil.

This is why one hears so much about 'intellectual property' nowadays. But it's a highly loaded term, because an intellectual property right is very different from a physical property right. It is, in fact, just a temporary monopoly granted by governments to authors so they may benefit from their creativity. The monopoly is temporary because it is felt that society benefits from the free circulation (ie unrestricted copying) of ideas, and the period of copyright protection represents an attempt to strike a balance between the needs of society and those of authors.

Pretending that intellectual property is the same as any other kind of property is deeply misleading. For while there is clearly no gain to society from plundering other people's physical property, there is clearly a social benefit from the wide dissemination of intellectual property - ie ideas and their expression. As Picasso said - and Steve Jobs famously repeated when explaining how the Apple Mac came to bear such a striking resemblance to the Xerox Alto - 'minor artists borrow; great artists steal'. We make progress, as Newton observed, because we are able to stand on the shoulders of the giants who went before us. Even Walt Disney lifted the idea of Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie.

As the debate about copyright hots up in Europe, therefore, we need to pay attention not just to the legislation which will implement the European Copyright Directive in each of the EU countries, but also to the language in which the public debate is conducted. We have to remind legislators that intellectual property rights are a socially-conferred privilege rather than an inalienable right, that copying is not always evil (and in some cases is actually socially beneficial) and that there is a huge difference between wholesale 'piracy' - the mass-production and sale of illegal copies of protected works - and the file-sharing that most internet users go in for.

This battle to regain control of the language has already been lost in the US, where a supine Congress and commercially compromised mass media have sold the pass. But in Europe we have the chance to get it right. Which is why it was so encouraging to discover last week that the European Commission's draft copyright directive proposes to criminalise only copyright infringement for commercial purposes, while leaving the home music downloader untouched. This is the beginning of enlightenment on this thorny subject. What we have to ensure now is that Tony's friends in the US don't persuade him to screw it up.

john.naughton@observer.co.uk