My argument doesn't hinge on the negation of natural rights theory. It's based on a simple observation of the way large-scale societies have always worked in practice: they have never treated protection of private property even in its purest forms as an absolute.

My point is not that the question at stake is straightforward, but that once we stop clinging to flawed analogies, the matter reveals itself as a policy issue like any other, an issue that is complex but ultimately resolvable by the usual means of analysis.

All the rest is rhetoric.

The statements: an issue that is complex but ultimately resolvable by the usual means of analysis. and All the rest is rhetoric. seem contradictory. What is the usual means of analysis if not rhetoric?

I was employing the colloquial sense of 'rhetoric' in that final sentence. Had I instead used 'sophistry', someone would no doubt have rebutted my choice of words by justly remarking that the Sophists and that Protagoras guy were jolly good fellows. :)

Explain how any right is a natural right. This is a spectrum, some rights require more effort to protect than others. Private property rights require a great deal of effort to protect, as do intellectual property rights.

It's not really the effort to protect, but whether you see it as a choice society can legitimately make, or something inherent pre-existing society. Is private property something that a society should recognize or not recognize based on pragmatic reasons, like how well society functions as a result? Or is private property some sort of inherent/moral right (as e.g. John Locke and most libertarians argue)? A similar debate comes up with copyright: is it a privilege that we as a society choose to recognize as a means of encouraging the production of creative works? Or is it some sort of inherent/moral right of a creator to control the reuse of their works?

In a given context, rights can be more or less fundamental. Imagine a hypothetical post-scarcity society. Protection of private property in our sense ceases to have meaning there and cannot be considered a right. How can anyone of sound mind mistake private property as a natural right in light of such thought experiments? It's a contingent and therefore non-absolute right.

You can consider protection of private property the most important right in societies like ours, so important it occupies a lofty stratum of its own, and yet not commit the fallacy of claiming that private property is a natural right. However, it's understandable why people with priorities like that would make such a mistake.

It seems to me that, somewhat like adultery, most people treat infringement against their property as threat to some stone age survival instinct. We can hear it when a small child shouts "MINE!" and see it in the cumbersome hoards of garbage some homeless people drag around. I doubt a post-scarcity society will be able to coolly regard all stuff as ephemeral and fungible; we'll still defend our stuff vigorously only there will be more of it.

This is why "infringement is theft" arguments are so manipulative and dishonest. They try to tap into this indignation rather than win the debate on the merits.

What makes some rights more inherent than others? Some people seem to think that a right can be inherent in an absolute almost mathematical sense. This is a lack of imagination. Many rights that seem inherent now were not in the past and are not going to be in the future.

Rights should be judged by their usefulness, not by how fundamental some person thinks they are, because no right is truly fundamental.

You're right in that nature gives us no rights. Maybe it would be better to say God-given rights. Thus the command "Thou shalt not steal" becomes the basis of property rights. These rights can be understood as universal as I know of no culture in which it is considered a virtue to steal.

> Protection of private property exists to the extent it's judged useful to society.

Interesting use of the passive voice - who's doing the judging?

Since this isn't really the place for extensive political theory, that doesn't seem very relevant to the point, so I deliberately didn't go into a digression.

My point is that there are two views of property: it's a right that is somehow inherent/moral/pre-existing; or it's a convention that exists for its benefits to society. How we can know whether it has benefits, and who decides whether the convention should exist, is a whole different discussion.

I don't mind diverging into a bit of political theory here, since it seems important to the topic.

I'd say that if we're going to view 'society' in a meaningful way - that is, not merely as a conceptual abstraction, but as something exists empirically - then we have to acknowledge that society has a definite nature, emergent from human psychology, emotions, physiology, neurology, etc.

And if we accept that society exists, why should we not recognize that the recognition of things like 'rights' and 'property' emerge from the very same antecedents? These concepts are all descriptions of fundamental relationships between people and other people, and between people and their physical environment.

The idea that social conventions exist for the benefit of society is something of a tautology. Obviously, anything that anyone creates or does is something they're doing because they've judged that it will be of benefit to them. The ideas of 'law' and 'government' follow the same rule - these are also just conventions that people established, in the expectation that they will somehow benefit.

But the real question, the empirical question, is this: what are the actual motivations that have led people to establish these conventions? I suspect that the idea of law emerged after the idea of property, as people sought to maintain the relationships they established with physical objects in the context of their relationships with other human beings, and sought a structured and formal way to do so without violence (or perhaps merely dissension and group harmony, given that cooperation is as essential to our nature as competition).

Fast-forwarding to today, with all of that in mind, I think it's reasonable to make a distinction between the conventions that arose from a 'natural' social context and those conventions which are the product of positive law, the latter being a kind of 'secondary' experimental thing, intentionally designed by the mechanisms of the earlier first-order convention.

In my mind, 'theft' is a violation of the first kind of convention, while 'copyright infringement' is a violation of the latter.

Indeed. People are so used to the abstraction of "property" that they've forgotten it's an abstraction.