> And "Nobody says copyright holders should be forced to publish their works." should be a warning flag to you. Once you get to a position that twisty, you should think to yourself there's probably something wrong with it.

Strange, because that's exactly how the patent/business secrets laws work; a company is free to decide what they want to do with their new invention; they can keep it secret and risk someone else reinventing it, or they can publish it (submit a patent) and receive a temporary monopoly on that technology.

What's being said here is that if you want to keep the rights to something, you must keep it to yourself. If you publish it, you must lose control.

That's exactly the opposite of what patents say.

Patents say if you want to publish something, you can still have protection for it.

Yes, that's correct. A patent is a legal construct that temporarily gives the creator more protections than they would "naturally" have. This is specifically done to encourage people to publish their ideas. After a time, this protection goes away and things are back to normal.

Those celeb photos do not need copyright to be protected from distribution. They need the right to privacy, because that's what's being harmed there.

Copyright just gets used as a tool for takedown because commercial interests have driven the law to make it a much sharper and more immediately applicable tool than privacy laws.

What twist? If you don't want your works to be distributed, don't distribute them. I don't see what's weird about that.

As for the nude celeb pictures, I think the original hack should be illegal. I don't think mere distribution should be. It wouldn't serve any purpose to do so, as we've seen - it is illegal right now, did that help anyone?

That doesn't mean I support it. Life is not a binary choice between "this is a good activity" and "this should be illegal".