[mrmyers]

Let's say I spend $300 and countless hours growing an amazing garden of especially fragrant plants. Do you honestly think it should not be illegal for some random guy on the street to walk by and steal my lovely-smelling air by literally 'taking' a sniff? He put absolutely no effort into making that air as fragrant as it is, but gets to reap all the benefit, while I'm stuck paying the fertilizer and gardening bills.

I can understand (though I disagree with) the pragmatic arguments you could make for copyright and patents for incentivizing creation. I cannot understand your insistence on pretending that copying information is actually stealing. You can't even plead technical legal truth, as they are absolutely not conflated legally. But when push comes to shove, this argument seems to reach for some 'moral' truth that one 'deserves' to be compensated for one's labor proportionately to one's investment, which is ultimately applied no where else in our society, since it's just the labor theory of value in a funny wig.

Let's say a mother spends tens of thousands and countless hours raising a child who never calls or supports her in her old age. Is this illegal? Our society depends much more crucially on the free labor of mothers and fathers than on the R&D of any chip company, even in purely economic terms. Pragmatically, one could say that people just don't seem to need as many guarantees/incentives to have kids as they do to innovate, so it's more important to have state incentives for the latter, and a temporary monopoly on usage is a sufficiently time-tested incentive. I can sort-of understand that argument. What I can't do, is somehow pretend that anyone should care more about the efforts of innovation going unrewarded than of any of the other crucial efforts essential to our society, for which no one is ever guaranteed a dime.

[twtw]

Your garden analogy is poor for several reasons.

the primary reason is that it is not remotely comparable to the theft of trade secrets in my example. If the gardener put their garden in a greenhouse and put a padlock on the door, then the scenario would be more comparable, but then it wouldn't make a lot of sense to say it should "obviously" be legal for someone to break in and take a sniff, because it's just a sniff, right?

Your parent/child analogy is poor because you are just describing an investment that doesn't pay off for any number of reasons, not that somebody stole the value from you. Perhaps more comparable would be if a parent raised a child until adulthood, at which point someone stole the young adult, brainwashed them to think they were the parents, and the child visited the fake parents in their old age.

That sounds far fetched, but it is far more comparable to the scenario I introduced of someone stealing a company's intellectual property and profiting off of it.