And, by the way, there are several key distinctions between intellectual property and non-intellectual property that make it at least plausible to treat them differently. The most basic distinction is that intellectual property can be copied, but other property cannot. If you own an acre of land, no one can deprive you of it by copying it. Same thing with money. You're not worried about losing your money to copiers. So if there's to be a rule against stealing other people's property, it's a pretty straightforward proposition when that happens in the case of non-intellectual property. Two people can't have it at the same time.
But when it comes to intellectual property, we are forced to define what it is that the creator owns. We can't just point to a physical object. When Dickens wrote "Tale of Two Cities," he had a copyright, but did that mean that no one else was entitled to write a novel that also began with the phrase "It was the best of times"? Probably not. Assuming that no one else had ever written a novel featuring action in two separate cities, and culminating in the noble sacrifice of an individual who saves someone's life by exploiting his physical resemblance to that person, did Dickens thereby have the right to insist that no one else write such a novel? And did Lewis Carroll own the right to prevent other authors from naming their main character "Alice" and having her enter fantasy worlds?
It doesn't matter how you answer these specific questions at the moment. My point is that the rights need to be defined, and that need immediately gets you involved in questions of public policy. In defining what it is that a copyright holder "owns," and discussing policy (including the possibility that defining ownership too broadly would restrict the artistic freedom of other creators, or allow people to engage in activities resembling censorship, or prevent other people from engaging in public discourse, or unfairly restrict the intellectual activities of others), it has always been the case that one of the parameters of ownership under discussion has been the duration of copyright.
To assert that there is no reason it should not be the same as the duration of physical wealth strikes me as conclusory and facile. Maybe an argument can be made that this is so based on policy reasons (though I don't think so), but it's not enough to pound the table and beg the question by saying "that's what ownership is, goddamit!", or "that way socialism lies!" When it comes to intellectual property, ownership "is" what we as a society decide it is, and that has been the case in free, non-socialist societies for several centuries now.
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