Thomas Jefferson put it beautifully:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Information wants you to stop anthropomorphizing it.
But we have selected an economic system that depends on ownership to drive exchange in a market, so... that's why.
The nature of information is to dissolve into entropy.
Specifically all forms of intellectual property in the USA trace back to Article I Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution. Which gives Congress the power, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
It absolutely is.
Doing it at all requires time & attentive focus, which is a finite resource for anybody mortal, and moreover a resource that's scarce and has to be spent in multiple places.
Doing it well requires significant investment in practice and training, often years of it, maybe even decades in order to develop certain levels of expressive fluency.
As with any issue of scarcity, economics comes in. If you want this activity supported, one good way of doing it is enabling the investment of time. Copyright does this by giving people an economic/legal claim on how copies of their work are distributed.
Paying for copies has the usual market merits -- the economic reward and signals of value are proportional to copies acquired. There are other ways of course, common ones brought up here are patronage and merchandising, but they lose the market merits, and both are basically another way of saying "nobody should have to pay for the value in your work directly," and merchandising is even worse in that it's basically saying "yeah, you'll just need another job to support yourself while you're doing this thing", which is time taken away from investment in the creative endeavor, so you'll get less of the actual endeavor.
The trouble with IP is that there are lots of influential people that very much would like IP to be useful in creating welfare. Unfortunately the evidence for that is surprisingly scarce. For discussion, see e.g. Boldrin & Levine
Expression has no value in today's digital world.
Creation has value but using expression to exchange for that value is difficult, requiring limits on expression in order for the system to work.
it shouldn't. Or, well, it should, but it should be the one and only thing taxed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
The ownership, with heavy taxes on that ownership, pushes towards making sure people benefit from the land.
Technically life + 70 years - or 1 million years for that matter - is "limited" - but I imagine 14+14 is probably closer to what they had in mind.
"goods are scarce because there are not enough resources to produce all the goods that people want to consume".(quoted at [1])
Physical books are intrinsically scarce because they require physical resources to make and distribute copies. Libraries are often limited by physical shelf space.
Ebooks are not intrinsically scarce because there are enough resources to enable anyone on the internet to download any one of millions of ebooks at close to zero marginal cost, with minimal physical space requirements per book. Archive.org and Z-Library are examples of this.
Consider also free goods:
"Examples of free goods are ideas and works that are reproducible at zero cost, or almost zero cost. For example, if someone invents a new device, many people could copy this invention, with no danger of this "resource" running out."[2]
For extremely loose values of "we", perhaps - I didn't select it, and I would vote "no" if the idea were proposed...
It's pretty mysterious that you think you need to introduce this to the conversation at this point given how prominently scarcity dynamics figure into the comment you're replying to.
> Physical books are intrinsically scarce
Once their production was industrialized with printing press tech, copies of books weren't scarce, they were actually revolutionarily cheap.
The copyright bargain isn't borne out of ignorance of how changes in that direction affect the overall dynamic, it's borne out of deep understanding of what remains scarce and risky and difficult to compensate for when the marginal cost of producing copies drops drastically, and what kind of claims might help.
Authorship may be scarce - costly and resource intensive (LLMs notwithstanding) as you describe, while copying and distribution of intangible goods like ideas or digital media is essentially free and unlimited, as I suspect PP was trying to say.
As you correctly note, the constitutional copyright bargain permits a limited time monopoly in return for (hopefully) advancing "the progress of science and the useful arts."
"which people in particular are benefitting the most" seems to be the perennial question.
"Property is theft" is not a new idea, makes a lot of sense. Unless you have a lot of it, and then those [censored] can [censored] right off.