Copyright is the right to copy annulled in the majority to be left, by exclusion, in the hands of a few – ‘copyright holders’.

The only natural right to exclude is better known as privacy – the right to exclude others from the objects and spaces you possess or inhabit. It is this natural exclusive right that the US Constitution recognises and empowers Congress to secure in terms of an author’s writings or an inventor’s designs.

Copyright (the Statute of Anne enacted in Britain 1709, US 1790), by effectively annulling the people’s natural right to copy, thereby creates the privilege to exclude others from copying their own possessions, a quasi ‘exclusive right’. Obviously, in nature, no-one has the natural power to prevent others making copies of what they possess (whereas they do have the natural power to exclude burglars).

Today, far too few people know the difference between a right that exists in man by nature and a ‘right’ created by legally annulling or abridging a natural right.

Copyright lawyers are happy to conflate unethical ‘rights’ (created by law) with ethical rights (natural) – because most people have picked up the residual folk memory that rights are a priori good (but that monopolies are a priori bad).