Um, I know what intellectual property is, and it's an area of law I follow moderately closely.
There are a couple of things to look at here: first, intellectual property does not behave like physical property. This is fairly obvious - if I steal your cow, you don't have a cow anymore. If I pirate your music, there might be something to be said for value dilution (though that's less trivial than it might seem at first glance) but I haven't removed something from you at all. I'm not advocating that there shouldn't be something in the general genre of what we now call intellectual property, but that it's being generally discussed in terms of physical property is simple-minded and misleading.
Second, and far more in our faces (though really, I think the first is the more interesting philosophical issue) the social, legal and technological landscape in which intellectual property exists has changed a lot, and is changing. Patents are being used more to suppress than promote innovation. Copyright is getting absurd - in the US, it's hard to say if anything contemporaneous with Mickey Mouse or younger will ever become public domain. Is intellectual property something that a creator should be able to hold and pass down to their heirs in perpetuity? What social function does that serve? Again, I'm not against any form of copyright, but what we have is getting pretty silly.
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There are a couple of things to look at here: first, intellectual property does not behave like physical property. This is fairly obvious - if I steal your cow, you don't have a cow anymore. If I pirate your music, there might be something to be said for value dilution (though that's less trivial than it might seem at first glance) but I haven't removed something from you at all. I'm not advocating that there shouldn't be something in the general genre of what we now call intellectual property, but that it's being generally discussed in terms of physical property is simple-minded and misleading.
Second, and far more in our faces (though really, I think the first is the more interesting philosophical issue) the social, legal and technological landscape in which intellectual property exists has changed a lot, and is changing. Patents are being used more to suppress than promote innovation. Copyright is getting absurd - in the US, it's hard to say if anything contemporaneous with Mickey Mouse or younger will ever become public domain. Is intellectual property something that a creator should be able to hold and pass down to their heirs in perpetuity? What social function does that serve? Again, I'm not against any form of copyright, but what we have is getting pretty silly.