Wealth & Money Quote by John Perry Barlow

Calling intellectual property an oxymoron is classic Barlow: a cyber-libertarian provocation dressed up as plainspoken common sense. The move is rhetorical jujitsu. He doesn’t argue that artists shouldn’t be paid; he attacks the metaphor doing the heavy lifting. “Property” smuggles in assumptions from land and widgets scarcity, exclusion, depletion and drags them into a realm where copying is frictionless. By labeling that mismatch “natural economy,” he frames copyright not as a neutral legal tool but as an attempt to override physics with statute.

The subtext is a 1990s internet zeitgeist: the web as a new frontier where information wants to be free, where centralized gatekeepers look not just outdated but illegitimate. Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a Grateful Dead lyricist steeped in tape-trading culture, is speaking from a world where sharing wasn’t piracy so much as community infrastructure. His phrasing “even after you give it to many others” insists on abundance: unlike a chair, an idea doesn’t leave your house when it’s duplicated.

There’s also a strategic innocence in “tricky.” He concedes complexity while nudging you to see enforcement as inherently awkward, even faintly absurd: to “own” a non-rival good requires surveillance, locks, lawsuits. That’s the hidden critique. Intellectual property becomes less a reward for creation and more a system for manufacturing scarcity after the fact. Whether you buy his politics or not, the quote works because it targets the metaphor, and in policy fights, metaphors are the battlefield.