In his 2004 book The Hacker Manifesto, media theorist McKenzie Wark coins the term “vectoralist class” to refer to those who profit from commodifying information. This process is enforced by intellectual property restrictions to prevent sharing, resulting in an artificial scarcity of a non-scarce good. Given that property rights originally developed under conditions of scarcity, it feels somewhat odd, from a consumer perspective, to apply those same rights to non-scarce goods which can be replicated at zero marginal cost. As a result, initiatives for “digital rights management” are typically unpopular among the public, straining consumer expectations of ownership by imposing restrictions on what you can do with the songs, movies, or e-books you have paid for.

This “artificial scarcity” is needed for capitalism to work as anything that are “non-scarce goods which can be replicated at zero marginal cost” have no value ($0) in capitalism. So all the “IP” laws are there to put information on the market, extend the system that should never be used for information (or anything abundant). What we need is another system that can support creation of information (pay the developer, song writer etc.) but without having their output to be “commodified”.