properly passive
"Any one who frees himself from the crudest materialism readily recognizes that as a legal term, "property" does not denote material things, but rather certain rights. In the world of nature . . . there are things but clearly no property rights.
Further reflection shows that a property right is not to be identified with the fact of physical possession. Whatever technical definition of property we may prefer, we must recognize that a property right is a relation not between an owner and a thing, but between the owner and individuals with reference to things." (Morris Cohen, 1933, "Property and Sovereignty")
This becomes unmistakable if we consider intangible property, which constitutes an ever increasing part of the capitalized assets of corporations. "[T]he essence of private property is always the right to exclude others." Corporate private property rights exclude individuals and communities from access to commonwealth and power.
-- Corporations and the Public Interest (PDF), Karen Coulter selected articles from Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy from the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD)
People who have studied the issue of intellectual property rights carefully (such as lawyers) say that there is no intrinsic right to intellectual property. The kinds of supposed intellectual property rights that the government recognizes were created by specific acts of legislation for specific purposes.
...Celebrating amateur culture; by which I don't mean amateurish culture, I mean culture where people produce for the love of what they're doing, and not for the money.
[...]
You can't kill the instinct that technology produces, we can only criminalize it.
We can't stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground
We can't make our kids passive again, we can only make them "pirates."-- Larry Lessig, How creativity is being strangled by the law, TED Talks