It's weird how "intellectual property" somehow got associated with personal liberty, the free market etc., when in fact it totally goes against those ideas.
Unless, of course, somebody else is granted the intellectual property rights to it.
If I compose a poem or a play, and contract with a publisher to publish said poem and pay me a portion of the proceeds (or contract with a theater company to perform the play, and similarly pay me a portion of the proceeds), and some third party takes the poem/play and publishes/performs it without paying me, I have, in fact, been deprived of something, i.e., income.
And, if my reading of history is not mistaken, it is precisely from this use case that the notion of intellectual property (in the initial form of copyright) takes its foundation.
Second: the big question is: why should we make the form of such a contract a general rule/law? Just assuming it is a matter of contract is just assuming away the interesting question.
It is. Copyright is and always was designed for distributors, not authors. It's nothing more than a myth - or rather, industry propaganda - that copyright was invented by authors. Here's a nice round-up of the entire history of copyright:
The Internet and personal computing technology indeed add "roll-your-own" options to publishing and completing a work that did not exist beforehand. But, at this point, they certainly have not replaced the need for the (sometimes creative) work done to support the work of authors. Things like: editing, typesetting, music production, video post-processing etc.
What happens when the publishing model is dead? Look at poetry. Poets still write, and some of it is decent. However, big publishers won't touch a poetry book that isn't a classic or a guaranteed sale anthology. Smaller imprints will usually only bother if the book has won a prize. In a number of cases authors pay a reading fee to enter contests, and the fee pays for the publishing of the book in a near break even scenario. In the case where poems are published on the internet, there's a small but arguable respectable audience, however there's no money changing hands whatsoever. Poets have second jobs, I know some who just gave up, who went into finance and law. I'll grant that lack of market is more of an issue as copying in this case, but publishers can help make markets. It should be easy to see how the effects are related. That is to say:
What's the difference between a bitcoin and a poem? You can buy food with a bitcoin.
Not everyone wants to be a sustenance farmer for a living.
Here's an economic quote but I don't remember the source: "Profit is not determined by how much value you create, it is determined by how much of that value you can capture." Edit: Ah, looks like it's an Eliezer quote not from an economics text.
Suppose I write a book of sonnets. I negotiate with a publisher whereby he has the exclusive right to print, distribute, and sell said book of sonnets for a period of five years, and I will be paid $1 per copy sold. The book proves popular, and a pirate publisher produces, distributes, and sells an identical edition, but fails to pay me the $1 per copy sold.
In this case, I am being deprived of the income (by the pirate publisher) to the tune of $1 per copy that they have sold during the period in question.
Clear?
And why should you have the right to control that?
And who's to say you are being deprived of such income? For all you know, you could have received the exact same amount even if the pirate publisher had never sold it - maybe he did all the marketing work that enabled those sales.
More: for all you know, maybe the marketing work that the pirate went through has helped sell more of your publisher's copies that it would had the pirate never copied it at all.
It's simply impossible to tell if you were deprived of any 'potential income' or not.
This is both bad and wrong. I will attempt to explain why for each.
It is bad on the level that it creates an exchange of sweat of the brow work with originality. That is to say if I copied someone else's book in the more laborious way, I'm more allowed to copy it and make profit. As Justice O'Connor said in Feist, "The sine qua non of copyright is originality." Hard work does not equal good or useful work-- ask Sisyphus.
It is wrong for two reasons. The first is that roll-your-own publishing options are available to an author, and all someone would have to do to make a profit is copy your book from lulu, blurb or whatever ebook publisher you use and post it again with a lower price. The second is that, even if republishing was its own difficult endeavor, the gain a copycat has is simply waiting for success. A publisher who spends money on editing, typesetting, marketing and binding must print a number of books before turning a profit. A copycat publisher can simply wait until it appears a book will be successful before undercutting. This is a drastic reduction in cost and income risk, and it's definitely unfair.
Unfairness is not reason enough to justify copyright.
Currently, most people who care cling to two extremes: one group sees intellectual property as physical property, and think 'theft' should be punished as physical property theft. The other group thinks that 'intellectual property' is imaginary, because the cost of copying is near-zero and copying does not take away information from the original owner.
Obviously, the first extreme is completely unacceptable. Suppose (for the sake of the argument) that someone invented a copier tomorrow that could copy any physical object. That would be a tremendous win for humanity. However, the 'intellectual property'-crowd would come in and insist that people pay nearly the same price for the copy as the original (as happens today with books, movies, and music). On the other hand, there should be some financial incentive to produce intellectual artifacts.