[microtonal]

The artifacts produced from intellectual labor can often not be taken from an individual, but through copying potential income can. 'Intellectual property' is a concept invented by people to protect themselves against such loss of income.

Currently, most people who care cling to two extremes: one group sees intellectual property as physical property, and think 'theft' should be punished as physical property theft. The other group thinks that 'intellectual property' is imaginary, because the cost of copying is near-zero and copying does not take away information from the original owner.

Obviously, the first extreme is completely unacceptable. Suppose (for the sake of the argument) that someone invented a copier tomorrow that could copy any physical object. That would be a tremendous win for humanity. However, the 'intellectual property'-crowd would come in and insist that people pay nearly the same price for the copy as the original (as happens today with books, movies, and music). On the other hand, there should be some financial incentive to produce intellectual artifacts.