We should be able to ponder on the same ideas in different ways. That's how literature and culture flourished. We think that copyright and patents helped that

We should be able to ponder on the same ideas in different ways. That's how literature and culture flourished. We think that copyright and patents helped that because we confound the actual natural progress of technology and society with the appearance of these concepts during that progress and end up thinking that it was these concessions that fueled such progress. Instead, they just popped up when things started to gain vast momentum worldwide.