[foobarbazqux]

Plagiarism of something under copyright is copyright infringement. So, at least plagiarism is protected against in that instance. You could plagiarize Shakespeare though, and it would simply be a moral offense.

When you write code for a company, the company usually owns the copyright, not you. You've assigned copyright to them. Do you release all of your personal code into the public domain? Why not? If you use a free software or open source license, you're relying on copyright protections.

To reiterate, I'm not claiming that IP laws are a perfect match for longstanding morals about invention, branding, authorship, and secrecy, I'm claiming that they are better than a 0% match.

I'm not even disagreeing that IP laws as they stand grossly favor big businesses instead of creators. I'm just disagreeing with the claim that IP laws are 100% made up by the government and have nothing to do with our morals about wanting to protect creative work. I think we need better IP laws that correspond more closely to our morals about creation and less closely to our morals about capitalism.