@brokenshakles @CliffSecord @fatepony @qwerty People only tolerate Copyrights and Patenting because they're recent enough concepts to only apply to modern and semi-modern things. If you apply the concept to anything older than the last few hundred years it would seem ridiculous to anyone.

Could you imagine having to pay licensing fees to sell wood because Ugg The Caveman patented the concept of chopping bits of wood and then using them to start fires.

Such a thing is too ridiculous for us to even imagine, but thousands of years from now when people are all arguing over who owns what parts of Neptune, they won't have to imagine paying a patent license fee for fixing their spaceship's rocket engines because it will be reality for them.