Last month brought an explosion of breaking news about intellectual-property issues, including copyright--the public battle over Internet-piracy bills in Congress, with ideological alliances crisscrossing standard lines, and sponsors turning against their own bills; the Supreme Court decision, "Golan v. Holder," which strengthened copyright holders by permitting former public-domain works to be whooshed into copyright; and the Justice Department attack on Megaupload. To casual observers, it might seem that issues of intellectual property (IP)--the term generally refers to copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secrets--like so much in Washington, get decided through battle in the political and judicial policy trenches, abetted by lobbying. The striking aspect of the IP cascade was the ideological uncertainty--the unpredictability of where various parties lined up, or might. Hard-core libertarians and others, as has been the case in recent decades, continue to differ on whether they want information to be free or want it sufficiently controlled by corporate America so that Big Corporate can be free to make huge profits. Free-speech advocates generally loathe copyright expansion that blocks the ability of "everyman" to use or play with the speech of others, but they also share concerns of artists and creative sorts, who feel pinched by the ability of others to copy and distribute their work amid the digital revolution. As copyright law has grown and altered in recent decades, "intellectual property" has become a term that leapfrogs a number of philosophical issues, and a body of philosophical and jurisprudential work has grown that can help one clarify positions on the trench warfare. The author contends that if modern developments in IP demonstrate anything, it is that the law, as well as philosophical thinking about IP, has been, and must be, driven by action--and not just the action of copyright lawyers, new-media entrepreneurs, and consumers. Creators, as they have since the beginning of time, will need courage to fight the crimping of free expression that copyright expansion encourages. They must resist becoming control freaks over their own content, and behaving like supplicants when they want to use that of others. IP law can overwhelm with its intricacy, jurisprudential complications, and brute power games. Yet a simple rule of culture still applies. Those who seek free expression will always face powerful forces that want to suppress it. For the first group to prevail, the opening step must always be not to ask permission, but to "speak," in whatever brave form that takes.