Technology has come a long, long, long, long, LONG way since then.
If you disagree with that statement, then we have nothing further to talk about because I have learned it is a waste of time to discuss anything with dishonest people.
Human nature has not changed much, but technology now pervades everything we do.
Maybe innovation needed to be protected from competition in the days of the founding fathers, and maybe it didn't. Maybe "intellectual property" laws were just another obstacle that the American spirit overcame.
It is now possible to patent mathematical algorithms.
How far do you think the world would have progressed if Pythagoras had been able to patent his Theorem and collect royalties in perpetuity anytime geometry was used to solve an engineering problem?
The paperwork alone would have ground everything to a halt, much as keeping track of Microsoft licenses is a nightmare in a company with a few thousand PCs.
The ability to dispense with the expensive process of tracking licenses is going to move a lot of companies to open source in the next few years. It's already happening.
The people you would like to enslave with IP laws will find a way around them whether you like it or not. It's a derivative of one of the basic laws of thermodynamics.
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 everyone, 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 at 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.
- Thomas Jefferson