“I always thought that the man who made the corn should eat the corn,” Abraham Lincoln once quipped. For Lincoln, freedom, labor and property were intimately connected. He defended the right to enjoy property created by both manual labor and the labor of the mind.

Labor Day is the perfect time to recall Lincoln’s understanding of the need to protect copyrights and patent rights. Indeed, Lincoln’s case for intellectual property is even more compelling in the digital age than in his own.