Also, IP law is relatively recent in American law which originates from England and France. Originally copyright only protected works from authors inside the country was only extended to foreign works in 1891 making it roughly half the age of the US.

To say that in the natural world people don't always have their rights guaranteed does not mean that Senator age requirements are in the same category of Right as a Right to a fair trial. One of those is a moral right and one of them is an administrative policy.

The age of copyright in the relation to the US is kind of weird debate to have, because in general we would want to look considerably earlier than the formation of the US to talk about moral rights, or at least we would want to look at arguments outside of the Constitution to try and figure out whether Copyright is a moral right or a pragmatic policy.

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All we really get from the Constitution is:

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Which just leads to more endless debate over what "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" actually means, and whether a government right to regulate something is the same as an individual right/entitlement to a specific regulatory outcome (usually we don't treat those two things as the same). And we can go down that rabbit hole of what the founders intended, but in some ways that debate almost doesn't even matter when we get into what people are morally entitled to, because if the argument is that copyright is a natural property right that people are morally entitled to, that argument shouldn't boil down to "Jefferson thought so."

Looking at what the founders intended really only matters if copyright isn't a moral right, it matters if it's a policy designed to produce an outcome because then we can look at intent and see if the policy is producing the desired outcome. If people want to argue that they're morally entitled to a monopoly on pieces of culture, then they need a much stronger argument for that position.

What does that mean though? If you want to claim that copyright is a moral right, saying that it was invented early on in American history isn't a good enough argument to justify that. Lots of things were invented early on in American history that are not moral rights, they're just useful policies.

The US Constitution includes language like:

> [Senators and Representatives] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

No one would seriously claim that this means the Constitution is arguing that people have an inherent right not to be prosecuted while they're at a government job. It's a practical policy we put in place for practical reasons that should be examined through that lens.

And copyright is the same. The fact that the US Government reserves for itself the right to regulate commerce/sharing around ideas/inventions does not confer any moral right to any individual to have a monopoly over ideas. It merely gives Congress the right to establish that monopoly as it sees fit.

And as I just said it only recognized works created in the US and therefore didn’t represent any recognition of copyright as some universal fact. It was a relatively ad hock compromise extending some at the time recent developments in English law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...

The article explained how limited copyright is a useful incentive apart from any moral view. And it explained how the term affects the costs.