They should be treated differently because:
there is a difference, namely that laws of nature are not created by the discoverer, inventions, books, music etc are.
it would be impossible to treat them the same way, since knowledge can only belong to the person doing the knowing.
Miss Rand’s premise is that everyone has a right to the product of their mind. Laws of nature are not the product of one’s mind , knowledge of them is, and knowledge of such laws can be guarded only by keeping them secret. How do you propose the government guard your knowledge better than that?
When you discover a law of nature, you don’t need a special mechanism such as a patent or copyright to keep it secret (not that such a mechanism exists, it doesn’t), because you can guard it by simply not publishing it, or saying it in public. You have that protection because of simple property rights. If you want to bring extra people in on your secret, you also have the tool of confidentiality agreements, to guard your secret.
When patents and copyright become necessary is when you decide to use your knowledge and create something with it. Then, someone else cannot take your products, and recreate and sell them as your own. But there also cannot be a law that forbids someone from knowing your discovery, after you chose to tell it to them, or to refuse to act on that knowledge.
Okay, what’s essential about the difference between knowing “rubbing two solid objects together causes friction, tree branches are solid objects, friction causes heat, heat applied to a flammable substance causes fire, and tree branches are flammable substances” and knowing “If I rub these two tree branches together I can create fire”? The former is considered knowledge about the laws of nature and the latter is considered knowledge of a process. Yet if one applies deductive reasoning one follows from the other in a precise and certain manner.
If we are going to go in circles, restating our arguments, that is your fault, not mine. I explained very clearly what knowledge is, how it os not the creaton of anyone except the person doing the knowing, and how it would be absurd to legislate the content of someone’s mind, forcing them to unknow something.
You changed your premise from “the discoverer owns the knowledge in others” to “the discoverer created awareness”, but it’s the same false premise. The discoverer is free to keep his secrets, and when he shares them, others can’t help but know them, be aware of them, or however else you wish to say it, and they are free to act on that knowledge, forcing them to act on the opposite of it would be absurd.
To discover something implies that it already existed, to create something means that it did not. Why is it not clear that inventing a more efficient process is an act of creation, not discovery?
Except nobody’s creating new laws of nature. They’re rearranging knowledge of laws of nature in such a manner that it becomes knowledge of a useful process. Now it’s clear that rearranging something existing into something that hasn’t existed before in a given context is creation, but here’s the million dollar question: Why isn’t knowledge of the laws of nature simply the rearrangement of already existing knowledge, say knowledge of phenomena that can be sensed, and thus creation?
People have manipulated elements of nature in ways that are unique, and created algorithms that are simply one manipulation after another to cause a desired result, and yet sometimes it’s called a law of nature and sometimes it isn’t.
This is directly related to liberty. The difference I see is that one refers to the part of the process involving human action and one refers to the part of the process that does not involve human action. So in essence, when one owns intellectual property, one is owning the way humans may operate. So intellectual property is homesteading human action, specifically the actions that any person may take or not.
Look deeper into Objectivism, property is not the primary. All rights are rights to action, not objects. If a legal mechanism is not preventing others from violating your freedom to act, but rather just preventing others from acting in general, for no particular reason, than that legal mechanism is not serving its purpose.
Say you decide to paint your brand new Mercedes E Class Estate pink, and the result is the most lucrative marketing idea in the history of mankind. You have no right to patent pink Mercedes E Class Estates as your property. The car is already someone else’s property, and the modification (the paint without the car) is not a useful thing that you should have a right to patent. In fact, Mercedes can simply take your idea, because your attempt to patent the idea will be rejected, as it is not a useful product without the rights to the car, only a ploy to hinder their ability to freely paint their car any color. (except some that were created and patented by various inventors, but that detail is a needless complication)
Your opening strategy is just as meaningless without the rights to the game of chess, which is not yours, as pink car paint, without the rights to the car.
Then perhaps I may chime in with my own insights. I’ve debated this issue before and have new angles that other people have not tried, or at least compilations of angles that have been tried but which have not been tried in succession.