Craig Wright: You Don’t Own Your Digital Stuff. NFTs Could Actually Fix That — Without Intellectual Property

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A new article is out from Craig “Satoshi” Wright, “You Don’t Own Your Digital Stuff. NFTs Could Actually Fix That — Without Intellectual Property.“, Craig’s Substack (Feb 10, 2026). Subtitled: “Why the “right-click save” crowd and the IP maximalists are both wrong, and how a 150-year-old economic tradition explains what digital ownership really means.”

I mentioned this in a tweet:
Craig Wright

Oh, I just noticed this is faketoshi, haha.

It doesn’t start out auspiciously: “There’s a dirty secret lurking behind every digital purchase you’ve ever made. That Kindle book you bought? You don’t own it. That film on your iTunes library? Not yours either.”

Well there are two…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) February 12, 2026

The article breathlessly refers to:

A new academic paper drawing on the Austrian school of economics — the tradition of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard — argues that genuine digital property is possible, but only if we’re precise about what we mean.

No link, not title, no authors named. Just “a new paper.” Grok and ChatGPT could not find it. Apparently Wright is talking about his own paper which he is previewing/testing? here? He’s talking his own book in mysterious third person. Typical Wright.

As I tweeted, his substack article doesn’t start out auspiciously: “There’s a dirty secret lurking behind every digital purchase you’ve ever made. That Kindle book you bought? You don’t own it. That film on your iTunes library? Not yours either.”

Well there are two reasons you don’t own digital purchases. 1. the law prevents it, due to copyright law mostly. 2. but this framing presupposes this is a problem that need to be fixed. Of course, Wright himself supports copyright so any alleged solution to the “problem” caused by this is made necessary only by the IP he defends.

Now it is true that copyright should be abolished, but (a) NFT’s won’t “fix” this non-problem, ¹ (b) information is simply unownable, not because of IP but because of its nature (in fact this is one reason IP is unjustified). ²

At least Wright here seems to get the case against IP before launching into confusion, and he is oddly respectful of my arguments:

This is the argument Stephan Kinsella made in his influential Against Intellectual Property, and within its own framework, it’s airtight. Ideas and information aren’t scarce goods. Copyright and patent law don’t protect genuine property — they create state-granted monopoly privileges that actually violate real property rights by telling you what you can and can’t do with your own printer, your own hard drive, your own vocal cords. When the state says “you cannot use your printing press to reproduce this book,” it’s restricting your use of your genuinely scarce physical property in order to protect someone’s claim over a non-scarce pattern of information. You can’t own a pattern of information any more than you can own the number seven.

Kinsella’s argument has been enormously influential in libertarian and Austrian circles. It has not been seriously challenged on its own terms. And the paper I’m drawing from here concedes that it is, on its own terms, correct.

The vague and meaningless qualifier “on its own terms” is the red flag here that signals confusion is about to come. So next he tries—well, he doesn’t try, excactly, or not here; instead, he alludes to an alleged “new paper” that allegedly does this, just as his Substack claims ” I hold more degrees than most have opinions”—to argue that NFTs can “Actually Work as Property”, ignoring the point I made previously that the question is not whether something “is” or “is not” property. ³

This starts out far more coherently than Wright’s normal confused ramblings, making me wonder if he had help from an assistant or AI.

Moron this later.

1. IP is Not “Not Property”. [↩]
2. Libertarian and Lockean Creationism: Creation As a Source of Wealth, not Property Rights; Hayek’s “Fund of Experience”; the Distinction Between Scarce Means and Knowledge as Guides to Action. [↩]
3. IP is Not “Not Property”. [↩]