From and following conversation with Finn back in the winter, and "Slapdash Thoughts On Real Estate" two years ago:

I told Finn that Locke had posited three ways to legitimately acquire land-style property. "Incidentally, the least-Dugg Cracked.com list ever," he japed.

• No one owns it right now and you plop yourself down on it, leaving as much and as good for others
• Someone else legitimately has it and you consensually acquire it from them
• Someone else had it and is leaving it completely fallow; you mix your labor with it and squat and homestead for a while

This makes intuitive sense to a 21st century USian. For one thing, we hate waste and love utility. And this helps understand why one intuitive reaction to the Sita Sings the Blues copyright story is "but those songs were so old and no one was using them"!

But when you look at the four kinds of intellectual property, consider how we feel proprietary about the important people and things in our life. What are your intuitions, and how do they align with the particular kinds of ownership that you can get with various kinds of IP? When you think about folk copyright, what other norms does that remind you of?

We make all these analogies, we free culture folk, as do our adversaries. This is rather lazy and Sapir-Whorf of me, I never even seriously read any George Lakoff, but there seriously are metaphors we live by, and to win the hearts and minds of our citizenry we must activate the right metaphors as we market our ideas. And I'm enough of an outlier that I don't know my neighbors' intuitions; my contrarian heart keeps me guessing. I should read the research, of course, Biella Coleman and Rose White and James Grimmelmann, all the thinkers to whom I am a mere bikeshedder.

Perhaps we are more into a protocol for ensuring everyone's doing the same thing than we are into that thing itself.