Sorry, I did not mean to provoke you. You are the emotional one here :) I did not write to hear your analysis of how to discuss, most of what you write does not address the intersting question -the thing you just left as a question... by what metric. My answer is that there already exist human laws that do measure this I would say you could examine those.
What I opposed originally was you arguing from nature. That is a fallacy, and a big one, and it belongs in religious thinking not in rational thinking. Either nature is everything except human society - in which case I would say you would have a hard time finding anything akin to ownership, or nature is everything (which would be the way I prefer) including the ways of human society - and here you would find the idea of intellectual ownership nicely alongside the idea of other kinds of ownership like material property, slaves, trade-rights etc..
The law can be, and often is as I see it, wrong.
I did indeed choose my words poorly in that case.
As far as the ownership of ideas, I think we are going to continue to be at odds with one another. I have not seen reason yet to abandon my assertion that once you put an idea out there, you cannot expect to control what others do with it. IP law as it exists seems to me to be an impediment to innovation and the free exchange of ideas, something which I value more highly than
onone individual's pride over the assumption that they were the first to present an idea to the world.One of my favorite things about the internet is how much it has done to destroy the concept of intellectual property.