[pdabbadabba]

As a matter of fact, I do think that holding a copyright (are you OK with 'holding'?) is a form of ownership in the usual sense of the word. A copyright holder can sell her copyright to someone else and can exclude others from using the copyrighted material. These are the two primary criteria that are commonly understood (among lawyers, at least) to pick out ownership relations. What other criteria are there for a relationship to qualify as an ownership relationship?

It can't just be that a copyright is intangible, because there are a lot of intangible things one can one: money, shares of stock, debt...

[JulianMorrison]

Holding is fine.

The difference between copyrights and property is that the scarcity is entirely artificial. If I have your sandwich, you can't eat it. If I steal your money, you can't spend it. (There exists the possibility of copying your money, that's counterfeiting and it's a distinct issue. Not all monetary systems are vulnerable to it. But whichever way, copying your money is never seen as a crime against you. You can still spend yours.)

Copyrights and patents are properly understood as granted monopolies. In the same category as having "a monopoly on the sale of salt". Basically, a way of governments playing favourites by making someone a needless but coercively enforced toll-booth owner.

[pdabbadabba]

The scarcity points are interesting, but I'm not sure I agree that this has anything to do with the concept of ownership. Is it really necessary for a thing to be scarce in order for it to be "owned"? Why? I would have thought that scarcity would provide the motivation to buy and sell an item of property, but is not necessary for the thing to have been owned in the first place. Can we come up with a single thing out there that we think of as not property because it is not sufficiently scarce?

And what about things that are made scarce by the prevailing legal framework? Surely this is the case for copyrighted works and patented methods (etc.)--I take it that this is the root of your criticism--but it is also true of pretty much any other intangible thing that we think of as being property and, therefore, subject to ownership, such as stock, money, and debt. Is there any principled reason for requiring that things be naturally scarce in order to be subject to ownership?

Finally, I don't think one can simply ignore the policy reasons for the existence of the intellectual property laws that make intellectual property scarce. Maybe you don't think they are good reasons anymore, but simply ignoring the very copious literature on this subject doesn't seem like a good way to persuade anyone.

On the patent front, for example, the usual arguments are that patents 1) encourage people to make more patentable methods than they otherwise would, 2) encourage people to make greater use of the patented methods then they otherwise would (the so-called "extractive" theory), and 3) encourage people to make discoveries public (in exchange for legally enforced exclusivity) instead of protecting them by keeping them secret.

Maybe these arguments don't persuade you (some of them persuade me more than others), but I don't think they are so weak that they can simply be ignored in favor of purely metaphysical arguments about the definition of "property" and "ownership."