Stop calling patent and copyright “property”; stop calling copying “theft” and “piracy”

[From my Webnote series]

Related:

Copying and competing is not stealing or theft. The truth is that IP itself is theft.

• Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes
• IP Proponents Do Not Even Know The Difference Between Patent, Copyright, Trademark … 
• Copying, Patent Infringement, Copyright Infringement are not “Theft”, Stealing, Piracy, Plagiarism, Knocking Off, Ripping Off
• Copying vs. Plagiarism: A Recent Illustration—Grau vs. Hernandez on Milei

The state grants monopoly privileges, and to justify it, it and the beneficiaries of monopoly use propaganda to try to justify it: they call it “property.”¹ They have no choice but to engage in propaganda, I guess, since all arguments for IP are absurd. State granted monopolies are not property rights. They undermine property rights. It’s not property. It’s monopoly.² So what if it “can be” treated like property? That doesn’t justify it.

Then they demonize innocuous activities like learning, emulating, copying, and free market competition as “stealing,” “theft,” “piracy,” “rogue” websites. And they engage in propaganda to push this idea. But copying is not theft. Stop calling it that. Stop. ³

Update: Gaius, Theft, and IP Infringement

See Who are You Calling a Pirate?: Shaping Public Discourse in the Intellectual Property Debates, by Christina Mulligan and Brian Patrick Quinn.

See also Falkvinge, Reminder 1: Copyright Monopoly Infringement Isn’t Stealing (Says The US Supreme Court), and MPAA Banned From Using Piracy and Theft Terms in Hotfile Trial. From the latter:

In the U.S. Supreme Court case Dowling vs United States, the Supreme Court explicitly valued whether copies could be regarded as stolen goods under the law, and held that they could not.

Instead, “interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: ‘[…] an infringer of the copyright.’”

See also Mark A. Lemley, “Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property,”  Texas Law Review, Vol. 75 (1997): p. 873, 897:  “Intellectual property cases and arguments are replete with references to infringement as “theft,” which it assuredly is not, at least in the traditional meaning of that word.” Also quoted in Michael H. Davis, Patent Politics, n. 147.

See also See Dale A. Nance, “Foreword: Owning Ideas,” Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990) 757–74, pp. 757–58: “intellectual property may be defined as embracing rights to novel ideas as contained in tangible products of cognitive effort. More narrowly, these rights are such that their violation does not necessarily entail physical misappropriation or fraudulent misuse of such products, or any breach of contract or fiduciary duty. Consequently, the special term “infringement” is used to refer to such violations.”

Update: the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA), which extends the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, does employ the term “theft.” See Grok’s summary.

1. See Intellectual Properganda; The State, Destruction, and Propaganda. [↩]
2. See Intellectual Poverty. [↩]
3. See Copying Is Not Theft; Don’t Copy That Floppy. [↩]