Advocates of Laissez-Faire Began to argue that Literary Property Was Just Another Restraint Imposed on a Market that Ought to be Free; therefore, Pirates Were Exemplars of Free Trade

For the reprinters themselves, the problem was that there was not just one case to be made for their practice, but two—and they were mutually exclusive. On the one hand, mercantilist principles emphasized the virtue of replacing imported manufactures with home production. On this score, pirates were vanguards of national economic prowess. But on the other, advocates of laissez-faire began to argue that literary property—that mysterious and novel concept—was just another restraint imposed on a market that ought to be as free as possible. It was, they declared, at once absolutist, monopolistic, iniquitous to the public good, and philosophically absurd. On this account, pirates were exemplars of free trade—indeed, of freedom in general. Needless to say, while the first kind of argument tended to hold good in metropolitan centers like Vienna, the second sprang from upstart founts of enlightenment like Edinburgh, Dublin, and Philadelphia. Both stood opposed to metropolitan assertions of authorial property.

--Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 51-52.