It's not a natural right, we supposedly do it too stimulate innovation by offering a reward and in order to get things into the public domain -- obviously Disney (and the politicians that kowtowed to them) ruined that for the World.

Patents should have reduced with product lifecycles, copyright should be a similar period; maybe 10-14 years.

My personal opinion.

That's just words for you... Intellectual property isn't property, at least not a full-blown one.

http://www.av8n.com/physics/weird-terminology.htm

It's not silly, it's an evolved and pragmatic solution to the question of how society can incentivize creative work. More or less every society has developed some notion of IP and there's little appetite in wider society to debate it - the idea of abolishing IP laws is deeply fringe and only really surfaces in forums like this one.

Does it have flaws and can it be improved upon? Sure. I think society underweights what improvements to the patent system in particular could do. But such ideas are so niche they are hardly even written down, let alone debated at large. Society has bigger issues on its mind.

Like any evolved system IP law encounters new challenges over time and will be expected to evolve again, which it will surely do. A simple fix for Copilot is surely to just exclude all non-Apache2/BSD/MIT licensed code. Although there might technically still be advertising clause related issues, in practice hardly anyone cares enough to go to court over that.

> Intellectual property itself is silly. How can a thought be the property of someone ?

No category of intellectual property covers thoughts, so the question has no relevance to the preceding statement.

An equally valid, AFAICS, way of looking at it is that "intellectual property" covers nothing but thoughts, only expressed in different forms.