Win for Fair Use in ‘Dancing Baby’ Lawsuit

The answer for material property is that the use of material goods is usually exclusionary: one person using it means another person not using it, and creating a protocol to govern use and enforced by a third party leads to less violence over it.

The same isn't true of intellectual property: as productivity growth took off in early modern societies, those societies that provided for intellectual property outcompeted those that didn't, as it provided an incentive to create a newly valuable good. But it's not trivial to say that "intellectual property forever!" is utility maximizing--there's a balance to be had between the public interest to incentivize the creation of new goods, and the public interest in lowering the cost of those goods.

A lesser argument is from history:

Organized societies that consume resources faster than they are provided (so essentially all societies that aren't sparsely populated hunter-gatherers) need some form of restriction on use of exclusive goods such as land.

Organized societies have existed with essentially no restrictions on what we today call intellectual property. Some copyright is good, as we couldn't have 9 figure budget films without it, but if we were to restrict copyright to 40 or even 20 years, we would affect that not at all.

After typing all this out, I recognized your nick, so suppose that you know all of this; what is your counterpoint?

This can't be done with intellectual property, because it is often non-fungible. Sometimes an artistic work becomes very important to a culture, such that there's no suitable replacement.

Note: This doesn't necessarily make IP a bad thing. It actually doesn't say anything about it either way. The analogy to land, however, is not a useful one because of that difference.

Intellectual property rights are about things other people cannot do. If Alice wants to give Bob a copy of a book Eve wrote, she has to go out of her way to find and get permission from Eve or risk facing state violence.

That second one is unnatural (see also, positive vs negative rights). It is a deliberate state imposition, on the theory that society will end up better off as a whole. It's not a question of whether society "should" have rights, but of whether it's beneficial to interfere with the natural order of things.

To the original, they don't. To a copy of it, made by someone else, why should the artist have any say over what other people do? If they don't want to be copied, don't put stuff out there.

To the original, they don't. To a copy of it, made by someone else, why should the artist have any say over what other people do? If they don't want to be copied, don't put stuff out there. Just because you string a few words together, an intangible idea, it shouldn't give you some natural right to forbid other people from using those words in that same order.

Also, you pay tax on land you own, you use public roads to get to work, walk on public sidewalks, use public parks, etc.

You already know that the answer to this is that once you've shared your creation with others, it's no longer yours. The copy that resides in their brains belongs to them. You cannot, without the artifice of copyright, claim ownership of pieces of others' brains, or what they later assemble from those pieces.

Because artists prefer to get paid. "Society" is the one paying the artist, so it should get something in return. And how much "society" is willing to pay depends on how much it gets in return. For example, "I" am willing to pay exactly zero for digital content that is still subject to license enforcement after purchase, but I'm willing to pay 40 euro for a one-time live performance.

Sure, an artist can retain all rights to their artistic creation if they store the creation in their own basement. They can even leave it to their heirs in a will.