alt Hacker NewsI had prefixed that with "in my view" but in a purely literal sense you're right. Code and knowledge are inanimate objects, they don't 'want' anything. The statement is influenced by my belief, it is merely a common turn of phrase.
To expand a bit more, code is freely, instantly, trivially duplicated, shared and remixed[1]. Much like knowledge there is no scarcity for these artifacts without legally mandated, police enforced, artificial scarcity. If the full source code for anything (Windows 11, EPIC Systems, whatever) was leaked tomorrow that would be a non-destructive event for both the code and knowledge involved. People work around this with trade secrets and intellectual property law but the 'entropic' norm is for these things to become more available, not less.
[1]: Since we're being literal there is of course some energy and time cost to the listed actions.
Some situation being the "entropic norm" that things tend to without intervention is not a good reason to prefer it. If we allowed everything that costs nonzero effort for the state to prohibit, we wouldn't have a civilization at all -- the ultimate "entropic norm" is pure anarchy.
So rather than arguing from these philosophical principles I think it makes more sense to answer a pragmatic and very concrete question: is the world would be better off, or worse, for having intellectual property protections? I think it's clearly better because the existence of these protections encourages people to spend time and effort making creative works (including software). That said; I think software patents are counter-productive, as are extremely long copyright protections for software. But I think that for pragmatic reasons, not abstract ones that seem to fall apart when you examine them closely.