I agree. Intellectual property is not so different from any other kinds of property. At the end of the day, everything is intellectual property; your ownership of anything is merely a record written on some piece of paper or stored in some computers.
If we didn't assign value to abstract concepts, ownership contracts for tangible assets would only be worth the paper they're written on. Abstract ideas are inherently valuable.
"your ownership of anything is merely a record written on some piece of paper"
This is a very young/naive way of seeing it, as the Spanish saying dutifully notes, "physically having something is 9 parts out of 10 of the law for ownership" ("La posesión es nueve décimas partes de la ley"). Meaning ownership is not as much what is on paper but it is having something, claiming it's yours, and no one else claiming it's theirs basically (not always, but that's why the saying says 9 out of 10).
> as the Spanish saying dutifully notes, "physically having something is 9 parts out of 10 of the law for ownership" ("La posesión es nueve décimas partes de la ley"
This is already an English saying. "Possession is nine tenths of the law."
This is clearly not true. There are term limits on how long the society is disallowed from using an idea. If I take good care of it, my table does not disappear in 5 years, nor can I sell the same table ten times. The bigger issue with IP is how they are used to prevent others in the society from using the idea they see right in front of their eyes.
If we didn't assign value to abstract concepts, ownership contracts for tangible assets would only be worth the paper they're written on. Abstract ideas are inherently valuable.