Back in the late 90s when Napster and other peer to peer file sharing programs popped up, most of my classmates were using them pretty heavily due to the fact that we had some of the earliest high speed internet connections at universities. I think most of us sort of had the opinion that sharing copyrighted material was stealing, but because we were all poor students and felt anonymous, it seemed okay to do anyway. Needless to say, regardless of our feelings on this subject, nobody felt the need to call the cops. But then I started thinking more critically about it right around the time that the RIAA started going after individuals instead of the companies that ran the file sharing networks, due to my empathy for the people who were targeted by this campaign.
I did the thought experiment which consists of the following questions. If I make a copy of something, and I don’t compromise the integrity of the original, am I stealing something from the person who possesses the original? Is this a violation of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP)? They're not actually missing something when I make a copy, are they? No matter how many arguments for IP I listened to in discussions online, I was unable to answer with a resounding “yes.” In fact, the people whose “property” had been copied would never have known that another copy was out there except for the fact that they could go on the very same file sharing network and see that it was possible to download a copy for themselves. The copies being made cost the originators of the content absolutely nothing. Since this fact is self-evident, there can't be any victim in this scenario, which is a requirement for a crime to have occurred.
I went one step further during that same time because I was reading several books that postulate a computational theory of mind. Basically, this is the assertion that anything that goes on inside the human mind can be boiled down to a series of computations and algorithms. So if this is true, which I now believe it to be, that the mind is basically a very complex computer, simply remembering a song, something you read, a picture of a schematic, or what a Picasso looks like, are all the equivalent of just making digital copies of those media. Should it be illegal for people to have memories of something that another person thought up? The answer is absolutely not. You own what's inside your mind, whether it originated there or not. Therefore, if you make an analogous copy of something on a machine that you own, the same rule must apply, that you own everything that's on it, regardless of where the information originated, especially if you didn't take any actual physical object from someone else in the process. Because of this thought experiment and the conclusions I've come to, I believe that intellectual property is not a real thing, and that protection of it is a violation of the NAP. You are actually aggressing if you enforce it.
If you disagree, please tell me why in the comments below. Looking forward to finally having this discussion in a place where I won’t be shouted down (or censored) for my thoughts on this subject.