Businesses and culture are very different. Businesses exist solely to make money, and perhaps solve a real-world problem doing it. You can start a new dry-cle

Businesses and culture are very different. Businesses exist solely to make money, and perhaps solve a real-world problem doing it. You can start a new dry-cleaning business even though there's another dry cleaner across the street who does the exact same thing. Culture--the fabric of our past, woven through creative work like art and literature--isn't the same. Some culture exists to make money, but much doesn't. We all absorb it almost without realizing it or intending to. A child might inherit a dry-cleaner and build a career running and improving it, or likewise failing and causing the inheritance to go bust. But the child of JK Rowling had absolutely no practical bearing on the creation of Harry Potter, and the books Rowling already wrote are unalterable. Thus children who inherit intellectual "property" wind up as pure rent-seekers on our culture, at best idle managers/stewards of someone else's hard work. (Now you might say that a child might inherit an apartment building, thus making them rent-seekers in the practical sense--and that's true, literally. But an apartment building has taxes, upkeep, maintenance, etc. involved--it requires work to maintain. But opening a mailbox to collect the royalty check on your grandparent's grandparent's novel is rent-seeking in the philosophical sense.) Furthermore, new culture is invariably built upon old culture. All the famous old Disney films that Disney is trying so hard to keep out of the public domain were themselves based on public-domain work. Try using a character from a Disney film in your work and see how quickly their lawyers find you. Try copying a dry-cleaner wholesale and you're just one more business on the block. In short, comparing an inherited business to an inherited intangible cultural work isn't a fair comparison. It might seem fair because nowadays we (tragically!) use the word "property" to describe what is actually a "temporary government-sanctioned monopoly"--but ideas aren't property, and business isn't culture.