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Kant und Locke, wie sie vergnatzt in einer Kneipe sitzen und sich darüber ärgern, dass keiner Geld für ihr Geschreibsel ausgeben will, weil Aufklärung ja doch nur bedeutet, dass irgendjemand mit AutoritätaufseinemGebiet mal laut ausspricht, was sowieso allen klar ist. »Es gibt kein angeborenes Wissen«, sagte Locke, als hätte der das jetzt nicht schon zum tausendsten mal wiederholt, und erklärte diese Aussage sogleich zu seinem geistigen Eigentum. »Recht haste«, sagte Kant, »das ist nur vernünftig«.

»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 everyone, 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.« — ThomasJefferson