The most obvious distinction between intellectual property and ordinary property is their history. Ownership of things has existed for longer than reliable records are available. Copyright and patents, by contrast, were created during the late Renaissance in response to the particular economic circumstances of the time. They have since become the tools of entrenched interests who would rather suggest that things have always been this way and we couldn't live without it.

Is anything humans do natural? The only thing that can make something unnatural, so far as we understand it, is human intervention. Insofar as we conceive of unnaturalness as a recognizable quality of phenomena, it is more acute when the humans responsible are more sophisticated in their methods. We can easily observe a very large difference between the primitiveness of human society when it created the ownership of things and the much more advanced culture that devised what we now call intellectual property. From this construction of what is natural and what is not, we clearly find that intellectual property is much less "natural", though there is still the necessity of accepting that "natural" can be a meaningful idea at all.