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The people who wrote the clause of the US constitution that enables the government to grant a temporary monopoly to authors and inventors argued over whether to do so. It was not like ownership of land, structures, etc. The phrase "intellectual property" dates to the 19th c. and was not initially widely used.

What we call "copyright" is, as it is referred to in the constitution, a monopoly granted by the government. All your other rights are assumed to exist because it would be outlandish to say a mere government could "grant" them. They are protected by the government, or so it was intended.

Unlike real rights, Congress could pass a law setting the term of such a monopoly to zero and there would be no civil rights argument against doing so. Patents and copyright are nothing like your actual rights.

This applies to the way copyright law is authorized constitutionally in the US. YMMV.



Outside of portable material property, the idea of property rights as natural rights is pretty fanciful. Land ownership is a good example of a property right that was understood to be government-originated even in the system of English Common Law relied upon by the authors of the Constitution. At the time that the United States split from Great Britain it was understood that land ownership rested with the monarch, that land could at the discretion of the monarch be held in "freehold" by entities other than the monarch, but that the monarch retained certain rights on account of its fundamental ownership of all land, such as the power of eminent domain, or the fact that any property for which a freeholder could not be identifier would revert to the control of the crown. The authors of the Constitution understood that going forward such rights were held by the new federal government, or by the governments of the several States.

Moving away from land ownership, you get forms of property rights that are even harder to reconcile with the idea of natural rights. Mineral rights, shipping rights, air rights, spectrum rights, toll rights, salvage rights, etc. None of these things are meaningful absent the concept of a legal system enforced by a government.




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