Patents.
And there is plenty of compensation.
Actually, I was referring to IP in general.
And as for compensation, like I said, it is
potentially without compensation. One of the bundle of rights in (most) IP is the right to control who uses it- including not allowing anyone to use it.
Regardless of the IP holder's wishes, after a certain amount of time, IP passes into the public domain.
The difference here is that IP is an idea not a physical thing. A physical thing can be controled or owned. An idea has no such tangible way of possesion. The government can use its power to try and regulate how those ideas spread but there is no real property that can be returned to its owner, all it can do is punish people for spreading ideas without government permission.
That IP is largely immaterial is...immaterial.
Even an idea may be controlled if you're willing to take steps to do so. That was the idea behind trade secrets being guarded- sometimes violently- by guilds in the pre-IP law days.
And remember, its not strictly government action here- its government action on the behalf of IP holders. There is a mix of civil and criminal liability.
At any rate, part of the requirement for legal protection of most forms of IP is being affixed to a physical medium in some form. That can be sheet music for a song, a script for a movie, copies of notes for a chemical formula, or a "working" model for a patent. Even strings of computer code may qualify once saved to some kind of storage medium.
You ignored the part where I explained how the costs of copyright are externalized. They are paid not only by copyright owners and consumers, but also by society at large. The market cannot operate efficiently in this context. The market cannot operate efficiently in this context. In fact, according to economic theory copyright is guaranteed to create inefficiency. Copyright is a monopoly; it breaks the market. You cannot resort to the market to "decide" whether a monopoly is efficient.
Dead wrong.
1) The sunk costs of IP development belong to the IP creator alone. Unless there is a reasonable chance of a particular piece of IP recovering those sunk costs, that IP will never come to market.
2) The market operates efficiently in that context every day.
Every product ever developed, physical or ephemeral, has development costs. Those costs, along with overhead (personnel, shipping, security, etc.) are factored into the per-unit prices.
3) IP only creates a short term "monopoly" in a single product- and technically, its not even a true monopoly. Monopoly only exists in the absence of a reasonable substitute. Unless you're talking about something
completely new, or something that has very high costs of market entry (traditionally, things like utilities- power, water, etc.) there is always a substitute- even though it may be older and less efficient. You want to use the latest hyperefficient engine but can't afford the price the IP holder has set to do so? Use someone else's engine. You want to use a kid-friendly cartoon of some kind of anthropomorphic vermin to advertise your new armor piercing ammo but Disney won't let you? Design your own talking rat.
Copyright simply does not feature "full ownership" (whatever that means).
Full ownership would be a bundle of rights that will not revert to someone with a superior interest in the property. A license, a lease, a life estate, etc. are all forms of limited ownership.
The answer to your question is that ideas are not property, either in nature or in law.
Which is why ideas must be affixed to a physical form to recieve full protection under the law.
I may have the idea for a new form of X, but until I submit it in physical form to the right IP office, anyone else can claim to be its inventor and gain the attendent rights.
Gaming is a form of collaborative fiction. Similar forms, such as shared world fictions like the Thieves' World books, have historically required that authors using the work of others get clearance. In RPGs, one person creates the mass framework, others move and act within it. The GM has a copyright in his campaign world, his players in their PCs.
So we have a situation in which either a) a creator or author (the GM, say) must obtain prior permission before creating or b) is able to create in private but is unable to share. The freedom of the author to share his or her creation is effectively expropriated by the holders of copyrights. This might be tenable in the market, where parties can negotiate for mutual financial gain, but it is disastrous in the case of non-commercial creativity.
What we have is a situation where a) a creator or author must obtain prior permission before creating something
using someone else's work or b) someone has never heard of fan fiction.
In the case of non-commercial creativity, all the IP holder has to do is abandon his rights. No negotiation needed. No market involved.
Anyone can share if they want to- that is not limited by any form of IP. In fact, there was a commercial a few years ago in which a major car manufacturer noted that they had invented a certain safety system...and had given it away (yes, for free!) for all to use in the spirit of being a good corporate citizen.
Can we attribute that to copyright?
We sure can- the countries that enforce and respect IP rights have an increasingly rich body of IP to work with. Russia & China, notorious for not respecting IP rights, are falling behind. So many Chinese inventors are going broke as Chinese pirates steal
their IP that the Chinese government is actually cracking down.
If you want moral outrage, however, you will have to reach back beyond simple assertions and make a genuine argument about why that should be. Otherwise, you are stuck making (often legitimate) economic arguments about the relative benefits of enforcing the ownership of ideas.
If you want to see what ownership of IP and other property forms means, look no further than Hong Kong. There is a reason why the most populace communist nation on Earth has allowed Hong Kong to retain much of its economic freedom after it reverted from British rule to Chinese rule- it is an economic powerhouse. Every brake put on Hong Kong by the Chinese gov't has resulted in costly slowdowns.
Simply put, humans react favorably to being able to profit from the fruits of their labor. The more those fruits are culled by others, be they the gov't or just petty thieves, the less effort they're going to put into using their resources to bring that fruit to the market, and more into trying other avenues of making a living.
Your reference to "the masses" is telling, for it reveals the tragedy of copyright today. The masses are a subordinate group, constructed as the passive audience of a relatively small number of publishers and authors.
"The masses" was not in any way used as a pejorative, dismissive, or diminuation of humanity- if you wish, substitute "the market" or "the populace" as you like.
When I do a painting, create a piece of jewelry or write a song, everyone else in the world is "the masses." When I'm buying someone else's music or art, I'm "the masses."
No subordination.
