Art doesn’t belong to the artist even before it’s public. Information is not ownable since it does not exist independently, it needs a substrate or carrier; it is just the way an underlying object is arranged or impatterned. The physical object itself which is impatterned is…
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) December 8, 2025
Art doesn’t belong to the artist even before it’s public. Information is not ownable since it does not exist independently, it needs a substrate or carrier; it is just the way an underlying object is arranged or impatterned. The physical object itself which is impatterned is owned according to standard principles of homesteading and contractual title transfer, but its features are not separately ownable–its size, weight, shape, age, location, velocity, position, origin, color, and so on. You can own a resource but not its characteristics or properties; owning a red car doesn’t give you ownership of its color, of red; if it did, you would own all other red things in the world. That is why you can’t own universals; it would give you ownership of others’ already-owned resources. This is why information simply cannot be owned; it does not independently exist but it just the way a substrate is arranged. Likewise if I own a book I own that book but not its impatterning–pattern of words, which is what copyright attempts to cover.
My point is that it is not the fact that information that was private has been made public that means it is no longer owned by the creator; it was never owned, even when private, as it was never the type of thing that can be owned. The possessor of secret or private knowledge doesn’t own it, he just has the ability to keep others from knowing it.
The essential error of IP arises from the mistaken notion that creation is a source of property rights. It’s not. Original appropriation–finding and appropriating something unowned–and contractual title transfer–receiving an owned thing from a previous owner by consent–are the only sources of ownership of an ownable thing. Creation is just an imprecise or metaphorical term since we never create new matter, we only rearrange existing matter into more productive or useful shapes. This is what creation is: it’s production, transformation, or rearranging. Production requires manipulating and grappling with material resources — which requires possessing and owning the resource. If you transform input resources that you own into a more useful shape or configuration, you own this too but not because you created it, or made it more valuable, but because you already owned the raw materials (by homesteading or contractual transfer).
Both knowledge/information and scarce resources are necessary for any successful human action. Property rights apply to protect the scarce resources that the actor needs to use so that he can use the resources without interference from others, since they are scarce and can only be used by one actor; this is why conflict is possible and why property rights emerge. But the knowledge that the actor uses to guide his action is not scarce and there is no conflict possible and aslo it does not have an independent existence and as noted is only stored on an underlying medium or carrier which itself is already owned. All property rights are rights to control and use scarce resources. It is impossible to own knowledge. Patent and copyright do not really grant property rights in information: instead, based on the false idea that there ought to be property rights arising from acts of successful transformation (“creation”), IP rights are granted which limit the use of others of their own property: the patent prevents me from using my own materials to make widgets that look too much like those claimed in the patent; the copyright prevents me from using my own materials to print books that look too much like books that have a copyright. Thus IP, based on the flawed idea of Lockean creationism, ends up stealing existing property by granting nonconsensual negative servitudes over others’ already-owned property.
The flaw in Locke is that in his argument that actors who homestead unowned resources by mixing their labor with it so as to emborder it or establish an objective connection to the previously-unowned resource, he rests his argument on the assumption that each person, because he owns himself (his body), also owns his labor. And that, therefore, when he mixes the labor he “owns” with an unowned resources, since that labor becomes intextricably linked with the resource, he would lose title to or ownership of that labor-substance if he did not also thereby acquire ownership of the resource it is now mixes with.
The mistake lies in the assumption that actions (like labor) can be owned, and that this is necessary for the actor to own the resource he homesteads. Action is just what an actor does with his body. He owns his body, but not actions. Owning his body gives him the right to act as he pleases without interference from others, but he does not own his motions or actions, whether they are labor or leisure. Moreover, the actor who emborders and transforms an unowned resource owns it not because he owns his labor but because he thereby establishes an objective link with or connection to the resource which is better than anyone else’s since he was first and anyone else would be a latecomer and have an inferior claim (which is implied by the idea of property rights per se which distinguishes property rights from mere possession and which necessarily distinguishes prior from later contestants; which is precisely why the owner of a resource must consulted before another party seeks to use it).
The mistake arises because Locke and succeeding generations fail to clearly see the distinct roles of knowledge and resources in human action and also because of the well known relationship between hard work and effort and wealth–successful action and hard work and good ideas generally have good results (profit) and thus there arises the idea that there a right to profit if you work hard enough; or that you are entitled to things you “create”; the common expression is that you deserve or own the “fruits of your labor.” But this is just more imprecise metaphor. Creation does not give rise to or is a source of ownership. It is a source of wealth but not property rights.
All these mistaken notions, and Locke’s flawed argument for the reason people own resources they homestead–the ownership of their labor–is the Lockean labor theory of property, and it is wrong, and it led to the equally confused idea of the labor theory of property of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and then Marx. These related ideas about labor–that it is ownable–in the form of the labor theory of property have led to the idea of Lockean creationism and intellectual property; and in the labor theory of value, to Marxism and communism. All these confused ideas about labor must be discarded if the human race is to avoid the horrors of socialism-communism on the one hand and the IP holocaust and death of billions, on the other.
https://c4sif.org/2025/10/the-patent-holocaust/
I explain all this in many writings, e.g.
https://c4sif.org/2012/10/the-overwhelming-empirical-case-against-patent-and-copyright/
https://c4sif.org/2025/05/problem-with-intellectual-property-tttc-wp-2/
So, in short, “Ideas are immaterial and cheap, therefore they cannot be owned”, is this correct?
It makes me wonder about the next step: How do you view the act of giving credits in artistic context?
— MEL — Praise the Thousand Sun — (@testermelon) December 8, 2025
So, in short, “Ideas are immaterial and cheap, therefore they cannot be owned”, is this correct?
It makes me wonder about the next step: How do you view the act of giving credits in artistic context?
they are immaterial meaning they only “exist” when stored on some underlying carrier or medium–a CD, LP, tape, pages of a book, in an innovative product, in someone’s brain–but that thing already has an owner. You can’t own it twice so IP right amounts to a nonsensual negative…
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) December 8, 2025
they are immaterial meaning they only “exist” when stored on some underlying carrier or medium–a CD, LP, tape, pages of a book, in an innovative product, in someone’s brain–but that thing already has an owner. You can’t own it twice so IP right amounts to a nonsensual negative servitude. c4sif.org/2011/06/intell But they are not “cheap,” whatever that means. Action requires both knowledge and scarce means. They are both essential and necessary. You can’t act without resources, you can’t act without knowledge to guide you. c4sif.org/2025/05/libert Ideas are critically important. In fact it is ideas that are in a sense more important since this is the source of continuing human progress and wealth–the fund of experience grows every day. This is why we are richer than the Roman. Is is the human ability to remember, learn, communicate, pass down knowledge, emulate others, and compete that is essentially human and makes civilization and prosperity possible. This that is one problem with trying to treat knowledge as a property right: it distorts and impedes the spread and development of this knowledge. c4sif.org/2025/10/the-pa Intellectual property rights like copyright and patent only prevent people from using their ideas as they see fit. The right that IP gives the owner is the right to stop others from competing with. It’s anti-competitive, it impedes and distorts innovation, it censors speech and the press and threatens internet freedom. It literally jails and kills people. But these rights have nothing to do with fraud, contract, credit, attribution, plagiarism, stealing, pirating, ripping off, and so on–these are all different matters. c4sif.org/2025/04/copyin
So what exactly is your actual question about giving credit? Try to formulate a sincere, non-compound, non-rhetorical, and non-loaded question, if you are really serious and not just being a snide smartass, which I think you might be given your dishonest use of the term “cheap”.
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