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Notes -
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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