1. Alice underwent great expense to transport a rare new fruit bush from another country, with a little selective-breeding to find a variety that would thrive in local soil.
2. Alice sells these fruits. Perhaps she makes buyers agree never to plant the seeds as a condition of purchase, but that doesn't matter since...
3. Carol finds one of the seeds, simply fallen on the street. (Therefore contracts aren't part of this scenario.)
4. Carol plants her own bush and starts selling the fruits too.
5. Alice complains that Carol has wronged her and that she has some kind of right to the sale of the fruit.
It's true that in this low-tech example Alice didn't construct the plant--certainly not same way as with a program or screenplay--but she did invest some similar kind of time/effort/resources in making it available.
So the question is whether that kind of "work" creates some kind of right, one which exists outside any kind of contractual agreement. If so, what are its differences or limitations from her other rights?
It is, of course, clearly nonsense if you try to use it for anything more than justify unfettered capitalism or drug legalization. Most famously being unable to effectively condemn things like pedophilia, slave contracts or human trafficking. But this exact ability to come to counterintuitive conclusions about many things means it remains very popular among certain groups of people.
But it’s a distorsion of free market!
Not versed into philosophical currents, but very-right-wing people would claim that it’s not the role of the state to protect one’s IP rights, much less at least than protecting their physical integrity (at least every citizen has a body, as opposed to patents); The sponsor of the state to protect patents or copyright is effectively a “bribe” of states towards some private citizen, for something which is incredibly costly and unfair to prevent (think “The state guarantees me against the harm of my ideas getting used by everybody”), and therefore constitutes a unfair advantage, a misuse of public power, and a distortion of free market in favor of IP owners. Frequently seen when large corporations alter governments to tilt the balance to their advantage.
In a ideally liberal state, Microsoft would keep its secrets for itself OR choose to publish, but if you succeed to decompile, then Windows becomes effectively open-source, and you wouldn’t have such monopolistic behaviors enforced with the help of public taxes. But then the USA wouldn’t be hegemonic.
Copying/stealing their creation is akin to making a worker work for free
Would making workers work for free be less moral the minute there is a worker surplus?
Theft is theft, it doesn't matter whether the stolen product is a scarce resource