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This seems like a distinction without a difference.

Being granted exclusive access to put a fact to productive use (or any use) seems roughly equivalent to "owning the truth" to me.

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But it is not equivalent. The fear was that without patents people won't be able to teach and spread truths because they wouldn't know them. Patents exchange the ability to study and spread truths for protecting their profitable applications. You may be against that compromise because you think it does not achieve its goals or object to such compromises on principle, but it is a very real compromise between very real alternatives -- at least alternatives envisioned by the creators of the patent systems. Denying that alternatives that people have actually been choosing between for centuries [1], and so ignoring the distinction between keeping some truth as a trade secret and making it public but obtaining a time-limited protection on applications -- both are "owning the truth" (if that's what you want to call it) but in different ways -- is completely missing the entire issue, namely which form of ownership is preferable to the other.

One could argue about effectiveness, but it is a common historical intepretation that the choice between different kinds of IP has had a real impact[2], so the distinction is very much one with a difference.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law

[2]: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?h...

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