I don’t believe information can be legitimately owned. I think the concept of property only makes sense when applied to scarce resources, because only then does the price system efficiently allocate resources according to supply and demand. It doesn’t make sense to own something when there’s an infinite supply. And further, I wouldn’t want to own these words if I could. My goal is to learn and spread the truth, not to receive credit for doing so. Feel free to copy stuff, mix it up, call it your own, even make money off it if you can. All that matters is that people think and ideas spread.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. -Thomas Jefferson