It sounds like "intangible" is maybe not the perfect word for it. Money is a promise, so a form of a contract, and promises or contracts cannot be meaningfully duplicated, so they are scarce.
Recordings of thoughts can be duplicated at will, and so are not scarce.
Before someone points out that money is a recording of a promise, I'll mention that multiple recordings of a contract don't make multiple contracts :)
> So the thing that these licenses are doing is slapping on a "price" at a strange step in the pipeline–but only because copyright law is strange that way
If the law is strange, maybe abolishing is a reasonable reaction? We could conceivably have laws placed at a better step in the pipeline.
> Before someone points out that money is a recording of a promise, I'll mention that multiple recordings of a contract don't make multiple contracts
Yeah, but fractional-reserve banking ;) I'll stop here before we beat this dead metaphor any longer.
> If the law is strange, maybe abolishing is a reasonable reaction? We could conceivably have laws placed at a better step in the pipeline.
I think pretty much everyone is in agreement with "the law is not great and we should change it", possible most of all the GNU folks. The issue is that this change is slow to come (and somewhat unclear whether it will come at all?) The whole point of the GPL is to use copyright law as a weapon until we can make a world where copyright law doesn't need to exist–I guess a sort of world where you keep around a military in the hopes that at some point people will realize war is useless and we should all be friends. So not using copyleft is being a pacifist (actually, I think this very word appears in the post) but the point is that if you're doing that you're kind of sitting around hoping for a better world while people with guns come and steal your stuff. Which is a valid position, I guess, but I don't think you should be surprised when people come up to you and ask, "why?"
Recordings of thoughts can be duplicated at will, and so are not scarce.
Before someone points out that money is a recording of a promise, I'll mention that multiple recordings of a contract don't make multiple contracts :)
> So the thing that these licenses are doing is slapping on a "price" at a strange step in the pipeline–but only because copyright law is strange that way
If the law is strange, maybe abolishing is a reasonable reaction? We could conceivably have laws placed at a better step in the pipeline.