Quote:
Originally Posted by QuantumIguana
What the government does is basically to give the author a lease. The government doesn't "seize ownership" because without copyright, it is meaningless to say the author owns it. The property isn't really the book itself, but the right to copy it.
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No, this isn't how it works at all.
In order for the government to lease something to you, they need to own it in the first place. They don't own your content, thus they are not leasing it to you.
E.g. I can't lease a car to you if I don't own it. The government can't lease mineral rights unless they own those mineral rights.
What is happening is that when you put your content into a fixed form, the government provides you with a set of protections, and outlines legal methods of transferring and managing the content.
The idea behind calling it "intellectual property" is that, like physical property, we
do consider the content creator to be the owner. The rights holder can then dispense with the copyright as they see fit; e.g. they can transfer it to someone else, or they can publicly eschew some or all protections.
Nowhere in the Copyright Law does it say "the government is giving you a lease to your intellectual property."
The idea of intellectual property as a "lease from the government" is deeply flawed.