"Legal rights" is a vague phrase. I certainly don't think migrant fruit pickers should be able to copyright their fruits! Copyright is a tool for giving a temp

"Legal rights" is a vague phrase. I certainly don't think migrant fruit pickers should be able to copyright their fruits! Copyright is a tool for giving a temporary government monopoly—a distortion of the free market—for the promotion of "science and useful arts". It attempts to emulate the market behavior of physical objects (like, oh, fruits) when the valuable work is easy to copy. I believe certain things about its appropriate use and the markets to which it is suited. That has little bearing on my beliefs about other markets or the value of free markets in general. I believe copyright is a bad tool to protect labor rights (just as I believe machine guns are a bad tool to protect labor rights); that doesn't mean I think labor rights aren't worth protecting. Besides, my actual belief is migrant farm laborers should be documented (i.e., we should have open borders, the historic policy of America back when it allegedly was "great") and unionized and receive a UBI and preferably live under fully automated luxury gay space communism. At that point copyright doesn't really matter, certainly not as a tool to protect fungible workers.