Copyright is tied to speech and expression the way speed limits are tied to driving: copyright is a restriction on what a person can say and how they can say i

Copyright is tied to speech and expression the way speed limits are tied to driving: copyright is a restriction on what a person can say and how they can say it. As for mineral rights, "theft" is not so clear at least based on the history of oil exploration. If I drill a well on my property to tap reserves that span the ground beneath both of our properties, is it really "theft" if I do not pay you a share? Historically the problem was that people were generally incentivized to drill their own land, which led to over-exploitation of petroleum reserves and giant messes in places like Los Angeles. Mineral rights were created to solve that problem by regulating the petroleum industry in a way that minimally disrupts property rights as they are generally understood. In both cases there is nothing fundamental underlying the regulations. There would be nothing particularly wrong with a system that ignores the ownership of land above a petroleum reserve -- that is how air traffic is regulated in the US (nobody can demand compensation for the airplanes that fly over their property above a certain height). Copyright law has been changed many times since the Statute of Anne, and the original motivation for copyrights was to restore the publishing monopoly that had existed under a previous regulation system (the Licensing of the Press act, which was actually intended to enforce censorship). The rules are mostly arbitrary, and I would argue that in the case of copyright the goal of the regulation is also arbitrary (i.e. copyright was not established to solve an actual problem facing society).