Violating "Intellectual Property" is Not Theft or a Violation of Property Rights

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZMxM7DdQUM

In a recent video by the generally decent, economically liberal YouTube channel, Stephen Michael Davis, Davis reports that one of his previous videos was flagged for a copyright claim because it quoted from Bernie Sanders’ 2023 book It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. Davis unfortunately defended this decision by YouTube on the grounds that if he just posted the whole book or even portions of it, that that would ostensibly be “theft and a violation of property rights” and Penguin Random House would be perfectly within their rights to have the video taken down. The problem with this is that property rights and theft imply that scarcity of a given object exists and that scarcity has to be allocated in a just way. With words on paper, there is no scarcity and therefore no property rights and subsequently, there was no theft. Whether in the form of copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, or anything else, intellectual property is nothing more than a government-backed infringement on other people’s property rights by using the armed force of the state to grant a monopoly to privileged individuals at the expense of everybody else. If somebody wanted to copy Bernie Sanders’ book line by line and sell cheaper copies of it, who is the government to stop people? Words organized on paper in a given order are not a scare resource. There is therefore no property in the contents of the book and no theft would have taken place. If a person were to genuinely believe this, they would have to argue that the original discoverer of fire would have had a right to prevent other people from also starting fires by the same method because the knowledge of how to do this was discovered by them and they therefore had a say on what other people did with their property. Are we to pay royalties to the producers of Game of Thrones if we speak Dothraki or Valyrian? At some point, the childlike notion that governments are necessary to stop people from copying other people has to come to an end. As shown by how much trouble comedians get in for passing off jokes that other people came up with as their own, society does not need the armed force of the state to stop people from being slimy and plagiarizing other people’s work. All the same, however slimy it may be, infringements on “intellectual property” are completely legitimate. Feel free to copy and paste this little tirade of mine if you agree.

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