If buying isn't owning, the piracy isn't stealing.

Shit, piracy isn't stealing either way if you ask me but that's another debate entirely.

This is nothing new. There is no "age of the licence". "Intellectual property" is much of what modern "capitalism" is about, and has been for several decades.

The initial idea of capitalism was to have capital to back up your activity, and use that activity to develop your capital. The capital was composed of whatever you could "retain" as yours, by your own means. Meaning you had to get the skills, you had to actively retain the capital, etc. So it was self limiting. One cannot possibly retain more than one estate or learn more than a couple lines of work all by themselves.

But then, people started selling services in addition to goods, and those who had capital quickly realised that it was far more profitable to pay someone a fraction of their capital to extend their possibility beyond their own means.

So capitalism became some kind of club: if you already had established trust with a group that let you grow capital beyond your own means, you could effortlessly obtain capital, and grow it steadily, with virtually no limits. It was then still possible to become part of that club (given some starting capital and an ever increasing amount of work).

However, that changed in the 70s when nixon decided to abandon the gold standard in 1971. This move essentially got rid of the need for a tangible capital, and allowed the mental concept of "trust" to be the only necessary metric by which capital is measured.

This is the exact reason people like trump can strive. Con artists love this system, because they only need their skills, which consist solely of lying, to develop any amount of wealth, out of thin air.

The damage effected by nixon on the north american societies, and by extension on the western societies, and by transaction, on all societies worldwide, will only be truly understood in centuries, by historians, when our epoch will be studied as a static set of facts, rather than a dynamic stream of information of varying veracity.

Anyway, to the point: this in itself was the beginning of the end of capitalism as a meaningful economic system. But it wasn't the last blow to its integrity. Progressively, Intellectual Property, a falsehood according to which information exhibits the same set of properties as matter, went on to relentlessly turn capitalism into a kleptocracy.

Since the 80s, and the advent of computing, information has taken an ever more important part in society. And with it, "intellectual property".

By now, any capitalist with the "title to" an information can effectively forbid anyone else from having that idea.

This is the actual problem. That and the imaginary money. It allows all kind of abuse, and it does so nonlinearly. Which is an especially bigger problem now that anyone can automate nearly anything.

People naturally have issues understanding nonlinear progressions, and that is why Ponzi schemes work. And, also, why no meaningful majority rebels against our current system. They simply are unable to truly understand it.

According to what scott ross from the accursed farm youtube channel discovered, you actually don't have the right to own the software you bought ! if you live in US