Schulman: “If you copy my novel, I’ll kill you”

From a facebook discussion, IP libertarian and novelist J. Neil Schulman says to me:

You and your ilk have a problem with me and L Neil Smith that won’t disappear with the death of the State copyright laws. Make copies of our creative works without our permission and we’ll kill you. “Seno Akta Gamat!” [from The Fifth Element: “Never without my permission!”]

This is even more explicit than his previous, more subtle suggestion along these lines, in his logorights article:

anyone who attempts to violate my property rights in this logos should expect to hear from the legal firm of Smith & Wesson.

As I wrote in The Great IP Debate of 1983:

while Schulman, as an anarchist, to his credit admits that if it could be shown that his version of IP could be enforced only by state law, he would abandon it, he ends his speech with a very unlibertarian threat of murder: to sic the firm of “Smith and Wesson” on those who use the ideas they have learned from him.

And now he is saying he would just murder people who copied his novel without his permission. Ho-kayyyy. Need anything else be said about the lunacy to which the IP mentality leads?

Update: To his credit, Schulman has retracted his comment, after a long facebook discussion:

Stephan Kinsella: I didn’t mean it. It was wrong for me to say it. Of course I wouldn’t kill someone for a copy violation. I’ve never killed anyone and I pray to God that I’m never put into an actual situation where I have to use deadly force against an attacker. I apologize. This said, you make me seething mad and that’s why I wrote such emotional rot. The way you toss around the word fascist at lights in the world such as Ayn Rand and Brad Linaweaver is awful. I think your principles are truly fucked up and I will continue to argue against them. Just more civilly. Neil