I agree with everything you said, but do not agree that this is relevant to laws about copyrights or patents. This is THE most important thing that people fail

I agree with everything you said, but do not agree that this is relevant to laws about copyrights or patents. This is THE most important thing that people fail to understand about the copyright debate, because they are not aware of the history or the purposes behind copyright law: Ideas and words are NOT property. They cannot be "owned". Any system that allowed otherwise would be a blatant attack on the freedom of speech. The framers of our Constitution (and the creators of our copyright laws) were keenly aware of this. In the words of Thomas Jefferson: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. ... That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Copyright law does NOT make an idea your property. What it does do is give you a financial monopoly. It gives you the exclusive right to publicly display your work, publicly perform it, distribute copies of it for money, etc. If that's all copyright law does, why was it created? Well, let's look at what life was like in the old days: Let's say you were a brilliant author, and you just wrote a book. You would begin the laborious task of making copies of said book, and either selling them or distributing them to libraries, friends, etc. Then some rich guy who owned a printing press would find it, make a zillion copies, and you wouldn't get a dime. Nothing was innately wrong with this, because one has no right to own or control an idea or speech. But from a utilitarian point of view this was a bad system, because nobody had any incentive to create works of art. And so for the sole purpose of incentivizing the creation of art, governments began the "embarrassment" (Jefferson's words, not mine) of restricting speech in order to give artists monopolies, rather than giving monopolies to the printing press. And I actually agree that the copyright system was a sensible thing to do. However, the laws we have today are an absolute perversion. Copyright is meant to prevent businesses from profiting by ripping off artists. It was not meant to prevent individuals from sharing or enjoying art for free in the privacy of their own homes. But we're allowing big media companies to reframe the debate using misleading terms like "intellectual property", "piracy", and "theft". And we're allowing them to strip our rights away from us, not to promote the progress of science and the arts, but to line their pockets.