I understand the position, I just don’t agree with it.
What other property “expires” it’s title? It’s tantamount to saying that your house and land should “expire” as your property, and that you only have use of it for a few years after which your neighbors can just rustle around in your garage whenever they wish. Copyright is property. A trademark is property.
I will submit that patents ARE different. A patent isn’t property. It’s a privilege of monopoly, a granted monopoly that the state agrees to enforce, and it can and should expire after some amount of time.
The problem starts right there. It is not a natural-right property. It is a government-granted limited monopoly on the work. It can only be considered property in the sense that the limited monopoly power is transferrable and can thus be bought and sold.
Consider that way back when the territorial government granted you a 40-year exclusive right to provide river crossings covering a section of river in exchange for bulding the docks and providing a ferry. The right makes money (no other way to cross the river for 50 miles either way) and the right can be bought and sold like property. But that right to the ferry crossing isn't your property, just a temporary monopoly right. The way you exercise the right for profit, the ferry itself, is property just as the means to exercise copyright, a physical book, is property.
Somebody can build a bridge right next to your operation as soon as your crossing-right expires, depriving you of income, just as somebody can re-publish your book as soon as your copy-right expires, depriving you of income. But your income was derived from an artificial temporary monopoly, so it shouldn't last forever.
I will submit that patents ARE different.
No they aren't. The power and purpose for both comes from that same clause in the Constitution. And although their terms haven't been abused in the way those for copyrights have, they have been abused into unconstitutionality in other ways.
Trademark is completely different from both copyright and patent. It is not rooted in the Copyright Clause and has no requirement for "limited times" or a purpose to advance the arts and sciences. It is business law designed to prevent market confusion. It is also a granted right that can be bought and sold as property, but it is not actually property.
This confusion is one reason I detest the term "Intellectual Property." It confuses people as to the difference between property and granted monopoly rights, and lumps four things (trade secrets also falls under "IP") with widely varying goals and governing laws under one vague and misleading term.