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Jonathan M. Barnett, What’s So Bad About Stealing? The paper skips straight to the proposition that any kind of unauthorized copying (including copying of ideas and expression, but also and of more present interest mechanical reproduction) is theft, then concludes that “Some positive level of tolerated theft is an essential component of any transaction structure that maximizes the social wealth generated by creative production.” I don’t quite understand how you can call copying theft without first establishing that the copied thing is owned.

What really struck me here about the language of theft (second-comer side), rather than the more apparently neutral language of property (first-comer side), was the ways in which it highlights that intellectual property isn’t about theft.

This paper is also another datum for my theory that copyright restrictionists like to talk about “readers” and maximalists like “users.” Or anyway, they like to use that name for them.