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I really think that the term "Reverse Centaur" is underused
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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Weakening the private property rights associated with intellectual property is more socialist than strengthening them so that the owner has power over how others use that property.
It's ultimately a type of property, and libertarians tend to favor property rights that favor the owner, while socialists tend to seek to weaken property rights in favor of the public.
In my book socialism is about workers controlling the means of production, and historical socialists did not agree how that would work in detail.
Libertarianism on the other hand is primarily about the rejection of personal restrictions, stuff like: "I should be allowed to freely copy and share media I have legally acquired." or "I shouldn't be forced to pay taxes." This individualist thinking makes it usually unable to adress structural inequality.
That's a little simplistic. From a legal perspective copyright is a state enforced monopoly. Perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to reject it.
In the same way, someone on the left could view it similar to the English enclosures. Taking for a private something that should be in common.
Ideologically speaking it can be perfectly plausible to reject the current overdone copyright regime from either perspective.
And by the way Doctorow talks about collective bargaining and unionizing like the whole time.
I can also recommend you a great book by a Chicago economist that argues against copyright on lassez faire grounds, closer to the libertarian position, but really well supported with a trove of historical case studies.
Libertarianism is closely aligned with strong property rights, and the right to exclude others from your property, the right to enter contracts, even oppressive contracts, that you've agreed to. In other words, the freedom to bind oneself and exclude others. Libertarians don't believe in granting the public freedom to walk onto private land and pick fruit from its trees (or the right to harvest lumber on someone else's land).
Strong copyright is therefore fairly associated with libertarian ideals.
Intellectual property is not a property, it's a state-enforced monopoly over the production of a certain good i.e. the copies of a work.
It's perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to reject that (Not all libertarians do, but some do).
Isn't that what property means? A state enforced monopoly over the subject of that monopoly?
Ownership of farmland, a factory, a house, a checking account, a stack of cash, a car, etc., boils down to a state enforced monopoly to control who may use or possess that thing.
There is a significant distinction. If I have an apple in my hand, I can eat it. If I eat it you don't. I can't make it two apples to give you one. We can't all be eating the same apple. The physical good is finite. Whether there is or isn't the state, that's a fact.
In this sense, some people call property a natural right, even though anyone who starts with that usually gets way too far way too quickly.
Intellectual property is different. With intellectual property you have a right over every copy of a work, that exists or will exist, made by you or anyone else. And you can sell a book away, without a EULA or strings attached, and retain rights over it. None of these exists without a law, and without a state.
But it weren't for copyright, we could make copies of a book, and give them to people who'll make more copies, and so exponentially until we all have a copy.
Copyright also covers derivative works. Can you imagine somebody asserting rights over the cider you made with the apples he sold you?
As far as I can tell property has existed in all complex societies I'm aware of. Intellectual property is a recent invention.
I'm not at my sharpest, but I hope you see that there is a very fundamental difference between physical property, and intellectual property. In general, this is not controversial.
Everything you're saying also applies to non-tangible property rights generally, which includes property rights to land (and the accompanying rights to airspace above that land or mineral rights in the ground), and rights like:
Each of these are enforced by some kind of adjudicatory body (which we can call a law and a state if you'd prefer). But that would be true of anything like a copyright or a trademark or the right to one's image/name.
And so we're still basically talking about how strong the right to property or the right to contract is, and what types of rules/rights will not be enforced by the courts, and which will. Some types of contract terms are unenforceable, and some property rights are limited.
What about someone asserting rights to the apples you grow on the land they've leased to you? Or asserting rights to the water that flows across the land they sold to you? That kind of stuff happens all the time.
The fact is, libertarian doctrine is generally in favor of a strong rights to property and contract, and that's why many libertarians are strongly in favor of strong IP rights.
Indeed most of your examples are not property. You don't call then property. (Except kicking the customer out of a restaurant)
Of course libertarians love contracts, and love property, but in that ideology the most important thing about contracts is that they're voluntary, and negotiated between the parties. Which copyright isn't really.
And I didn't say that libertarians oppose copyright. Obviously, many don't. I said that it's possible for libertarians to oppose copyright without this being in open contradiction with the rest of their ideology.
All of them are property, technically. Including contractual rights (which can be bought and sold). And plenty of these intangible rights don't arise from contract. How much of the world's land is owned by people who trace their purchases/inheritance to an original owner who was granted the land by a government or royal family no longer in power? Including through conquest and wars ended by treaties (of questionable consent when you consider the coercion and duress that losing a war creates). The consensual transactions downstream from that system that nobody today consented to don't actually limit the legal power of that ownership.
That's true of contracts, but not true of all the rights that can get transferred around from contracts. Some governments gave homestead rights transferring land to anyone who built a house on that wilderness. How is that conceptually different from a king-granted monopoly to someone who invented something for the British Navy?
And then there are other forms of rights. If you crash into my house and I sue you, I might win a court judgment ordering you to pay me a certain amount of money. You didn't consent to that, but you owe it just the same. And that right to payment can be sold, and is considered property as well.
People hold out intellectual property to be something unusual and different, but really it's not that different from accounts receivable and stocks and bonds and leaseholds and licenses and other forms of intangible property.
You're really mixing up a lot of stuff. For instance, the fact that something can be sold doesn't mean it's a form of property. It means that it can be owned, that there can be property over it.
But listen, you don't have to convince me that Libertarians are in favor of copyright. You have to convince Murray Rothbard.
I don't think I am. I'm just describing a broad definition of property, as a descriptivist/positivist argument, observing that this broad definition already applies in most modern legal systems.
If we want to get into the philosophical underpinnings of what rights do or don't qualify as property, I'm just describing the legal frameworks that already apply. Pretty much anything that can be sold (or leased or licensed or conveyed in a will) counts as property. Lots of these rights are intangible, including the broad sets of rights under patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law that we describe as "intellectual property."
Property, by its nature, includes the right to exclude others from enjoyment or profit that arise from that property. And it doesn't require the consent of the excluded. Some argue that the concept of property itself is theft, for that reason.
But libertarians generally support strong property rights, and I'd argue it's consistent with that view to support strong intellectual property rights (whether administered by a government or not).