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Do you think that there is anything primordial in people that causes them to always consider some small sliver of all the ideas in the universe "theirs"?
Sure, but what "theirs" means changes drastically when the item in question is infinitely replicable. People often spend considerable effort preventing people from carrying off their possessions, and expend similar effort trying to encourage people to carry off their ideas. Ideas become more valuable the more people take them up.
So, no, the two attitudes don't seem comparable.
...except for the cases where they do the opposite and try to prevent people from carrying off their ideas.
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The relational parts of our languages are called possessives. Of course humans instinctively believe in ownership.
If FC agrees with you, then IP is essentially as primitive as (nonI)P. The whole shebang about it being an emergent property of our brain holds for IP, just the same. All we can do is attempt to work around this reality as best we can, just the same. Most importantly, his entire second paragraph seems to be based on a false premise.
This is, of course, IF FC agrees with you.
Personally, I agree with you. I think that prior to socially-agreed-upon law protecting physical property, brains held that some sliver of atoms in the universe were theirs, and they did what they could to preserve their personal possessions. They hid them, they fought others off who wanted to take them, etc. The socially-agreed-upon law worked around this as best we could, trying to make a credible promise that you didn't have to go to extreme measures all the time. That, in fact, you could loan your neighbor your ax, and if he didn't return it to you, the rest of the group would agree that he had wronged you. People could share more freely, given some contextual rules.
Same as IP. Before patent/copyright protection, you do still see some innovation in technology, and you see that people went to extreme measures to hide and protect the ideas which they believed they "owned" that they felt were most valuable. They didn't ever just share their ideas, and often, when they sold physical goods made using those ideas, they would even distort it from the optimal instantiation specifically to make it more difficult for someone else to "take" their ideas. You still see this on the international scene, where IP isn't socially-agreed-upon. For example, most militaries sell equipment to other countries, but they hobble the technology that goes into those products for export, specifically to prevent other countries from "stealing their ideas". Maybe patent/copyright law isn't the best law that could be socially-agreed-upon, but it has reason behind it. "How do we do our best to work around the fact that people want to hoard their best ideas?" Well, we'll give you limited time exclusive use, but in exchange, you have to share your idea publicly. It has to be published in a regularized format, to serve both as a mechanism of society knowing which specific idea is to be protected and as a mechanism to ensure that the idea is eventually shared to the benefit of everyone. Just the same as with physical property, people can now share their ideas more freely, since they have some contextual rules governing that sharing.
Can you give some examples, particularly in the field of media, entertainment, data generally?
High-tech weapons and state security information generally are among the few areas where restricting knowledge is straightforwardly useful, explicitly because the entire enterprise is predicated on serious conflict between the parties in question. But what's the equivalent of this for music, art, theatre, writing, the areas where the piracy debate centers? Where's the history of people attempting to keep their plays or songs secret?
This would be a more attractive argument, if we didn't see the history of copyright extensions in perpetuity.
From Wikipedia:
Literally went to war for it.
For a long time, things in media/entertainment/data weren't easily infinitely copyable. Text was hard/expensive to reproduce. With the rise of the printing press, making it much easier, we see the rise of formalized copyright law. Old plays, musical scores? They were physical objects. You could literally just keep a hold of the physical objects. Performances were ephemeral and literally uncopyable. Hell, the oldest known chess masters claimed exclusive rights to the list of moves they played.
I am 100% on your side that in perpetuity is a bad policy. That has literally nothing to do with your original argument, which was from first principles arguing that no such possible policy could make any theoretical sense.
As a general matter, I also reject your insistence that the debate is only concerning music/art/theatre/writing. The first principles argument you made was broader than that. We have good reason to reject your overly broad first principles argument. If you would like to make a different first principles argument such that those principles distinguish between those categories and, say, general trade secrets, I'm all ears.
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