[humanrebar]

"Whether they should be is a different question"

That's the exactly question we're discussing. The legal term "intellectual property rights" steal gravitas from more important (physical) "property rights", which are natural rights and are essential in a free society.

Your point is that "intellectual property" is a legal term. No one disagrees. The point of the people railing against the phrase "intellectual property" is that the phrase is misleading and that it should be replaced with something more apt. Perhaps you are missing that point?

[SEMW]

> The point of the people railing against the phrase "intellectual property" is that the phrase is misleading

I venture you may have missed my point. The phrase isn't misleading, it's correct.

Having the word "property" in its name isn't what makes it a property right. It's a property right because it behaves as a property right (ownable, transferable, binds the world). "Replacing [the word 'property' in IP] with something more apt" is like insisting that you can't call mallards 'ducks' - they're still going to walk like a duck and quack like a duck.

When I said "Whether they should be is a different question", I meant 'should the right have this set of legal characteristics', not 'given that it has this set of characteristics, should it be called "property"'.

Whether the use of the word "steals gravitas" from physical property rights is neither here nor there. Law isn't poetry, it's programming. Renaming a class doesn't change what methods it has.

[humanrebar]

In this case, intellectual property "rights" are not natural rights because they are neither essential for a free society nor essential to the survival of an individual. My objection is exactly that intellectual property rights do not quack like natural rights and that legal terminology (and eventually laws themselves) should respect that.

Referring back to the U.S. Constitution, a limited monopoly was granted "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". No one would argue that those aren't noble goals, but one wouldn't be oppressed if his patents and copyrights were violated.

If one's home or savings were stolen or unfairly confiscated on the other hand...

If you want to talk programming, it is a design bug to label patent monopolies as "intellectual property rights" because the "property rights" abstraction does not fit the idea of limited monopoly powers. Because, among other reasons, violations of "property rights" have side effects of a different kind and magnitude than a failure to respect monopoly privileges.

[SEMW]

To be clear, I wasn't making any comment on whether IP rights are 'natural rights' or not, only on whether they're property rights (which ISTM is a much more concrete question). Apologies if I wasn't clear about that. (On the main point, see my reply to your other post).