That is precisely the question that is disputed in discussions of copyright. "Intellectual property" in itself is an ambiguous term: does it mean the ideas themselves, or particular expressions of them? Copyright law says the latter: ideas themselves cannot be copyrighted (or patented), only particular expressions of them can. That is because ideas are non-rivalrous: people can give them to others without losing the use of them themselves. That takes away the justification for private property rights, namely, to avoid conflicts over who gets to use the property.

Prior to computers and the Internet, one could argue that particular copies of a particular expression of an idea, such as a book, were rivalrous: I can't both give a book to you and read it myself at the same time. But with digital copies that is no longer true. So the same logic that makes ideas themselves not private property, now pushes us towards not treating copies of digital works as private property either.

The original justification for copyright law was to encourage people to create works. But that was always a questionable claim, because nobody creates works in a vacuum. From the standpoint of creation, the Internet has made clear that many more works get created when there is free sharing of digital copies. And the Internet has also enabled other ways of paying people whose creative works you like, besides having to pay for individual copies; that's what systems like Patreon are for. So that original justification for copyright law has now lost whatever validity it once had.

The best piece of evidence for who really benefits from copyright law, though, is who is pushing hardest for draconian enforcement of it. Is that content creators, i.e., actual authors and artists and musicians, etc.? No. It's the media companies, whose business model depends on being able to, not to put too fine a point on it, exploit content creators by convincing them that working through the media companies is the only way to get them a large audience--and then siphoning off most of the profits for themselves instead of paying them back to the creators.

As I said, this is precisely the point that is disputed in discussions of copyright law. You certainly can't just assume it as a fact. But the capitalists who are exploiting copyright law to their own benefit would certainly love it if everyone would just take it as given that "intellectual property" is private property. That's an example of the general pattern I have described elsewhere in this discussion, that capitalists want people to think regulations are for the people's benefit, instead of for the benefit of the capitalists. That is the capitalists' ideal state of regulatory capture.

Enclosure of the commons was certainly for private benefit. There are numerous aspects of physical property ownership that we just take for granted that are not at all straightforward.

You seem to be using a “is it for the benefit of society” test to determine whether something is an intrinsic feature of capitalism. I’d posit that is not how the system is structured nor is it how it is intended to be structured. That’s not regulatory capture, that is inherent to what it is. You can’t just take out the parts you don’t like and treat them as a separate entity.

The problem is that you are assuming that "intellectual property" is property. You cannot assume that.

> Enclosure of the commons was certainly for private benefit.

Enclosure of parts of the commons that are rivalrous--only one person can use that part at a time--was, yes. But as I have already said, "intellectual property" is non-rivalrous, so this argument does not apply to it.

> There are numerous aspects of physical property ownership that we just take for granted that are not at all straightforward

This is quite true; it's why we have a complex system of private property common law for physical property, and some kinds (such as real estate) have even more complexity in the law attached to them.

But "intellectual property" is not physical property, and you can't just assume that all of the law that has been developed for physical property is automatically applicable to "intellectual property" as well.

> You seem to be using a “is it for the benefit of society” test to determine whether something is an intrinsic feature of capitalism.

I am doing no such thing. Indeed, the feature of capitalism I have been describing, namely regulatory capture, is not for the benefit of society; it is a net loss to society. But it is a benefit to the capitalists who buy the regulations they want. That's why they buy them.

> That’s not regulatory capture, that is inherent to what it is.

In the sense that regulatory capture is a common end state of capitalism (where "capitalism", as I have said elsewhere in this discussion, is not the same thing as "free markets", although capitalists would love for people to think it is), yes, it is "inherent" to capitalism. That still doesn't mean it's a net benefit to society. It isn't.

Intellectual property is property.

Whether or not it should be is a different question, but it factually is property.

Why? Is there some natural law that gives me ownership to the meaning of the words I say? That bars you from repeating that meaning in those words?

You are literally inverting the facts (actual law that exists) and subjective preferences that are not facts (“natural law”).

What natural law gives you the right to own land?

There isn't one. It's an arbitrary social construct. The argument that IP is property is built on a circle of quicksand.

In the case of land, at least, exclusivity of use can be an argument one could make (Only one person can physically use any one plot of it for any one particular purpose, and gosh, maybe it's in the social interest to have some set of rules for ajudicating disputes between two people who want to use it for different purposes, and one of many solutions to that question is private land ownership), but that's not even an argument that has any applicability in the IP space.

What's most interesting is that the IP commons can be freely plundered, at no cost, to build IP that is owned by someone. If we're going to treat IP as property, why does the creation of new IP not require a tax, levy, or dividend to be paid to the collective owners of the IP commons? All ideas are, after all, derivative.

No, works that are copyrighted in accordance with applicable law are by law the private property of the copyright owner. To the extent that is "factual", it's only that way to the extent that we all agree to respect the relevant laws.

But in any case, "intellectual property" is a broader term than that--indeed, as it is used by the capitalists (e.g., media companies) who advocate for more and more expansive and draconian regulation in this area, it is much broader. Capitalists want to claim copyright over particular words or particular symbols. They want to claim copyright over ideas. And they invented the term "intellectual property" precisely in order to try to trade on the implicit (but invalid) analogy with physical property, which is rivalrous, whereas "intellectual property" is not.

What western legal system is based is such a way that it doesn’t consider IP to be private property? I am not aware of any. The notion that such a narrow definition is the basis of most actual property law runs contrary to empirical evidence.

> There are edge cases--for example, multiple people can ride in a car even if it's only considered the private property of one of them--but they aren't relevant to the discussion we're having here.

But that's not just edge cases. Jointly operated objects and co-habited houses make up a huge fraction of what we commonly consider to be property. I don't think you can brush this away as an edge case.

I mean, come to think it, looking at what objects currently surround me, most of them can be used by more than one person at same time.

It is explicitly a property right. Hence the phrase “intellectual property”.

In many ways it resembles a property right, but it is missing fundamental aspects of property rights.

What copyright actually is is a limited-time monopoly right. When it expires, the creator of the work loses that "right". It exists not for the benefit of the creators of a work, but for the benefit of the public.

Copyright is a temporary restriction on the rights of others. As a society, we deem that acceptable because it's temporary and because it encourages people to make their works publicly available, thus enriching culture and society.

If it were a property right, then it would make no sense that you lose that property at the expiration of copyright.

No, its not.

> What copyright actually is is a limited-time monopoly right.

Limited time monopoly rights are property rights. A life tenancy in real property is a property right.

(Copyright lacks what some consider essetmbtial features of ownership of the subject matter of a property right, as opposed to ownership of a property right in that subject matter, but ownership of the subject of property rights is not the only kind of property right.)

Copyright may be owned, bought, sold, transferred or otherwise discharged in the same manner that any other form of property is. Nothing about property inherently implies such claim exists in perpetuity.

I was interpreting "property right" at a different level of abstraction than you. I was thinking it was referring to the thing that is copyrighted as being the "property", not the copyright itself.

Changing my frame of reference up a level of abstraction puts us in agreement, I think.