Your points are good ones, and I agree that tangible and intangible property are different and should be treated differently under the law.
The element of commonality that I was stressing had to do with the idea that each form of property was subject to a bundle of rights - granted, to a different bundle in each case but nonetheless to some grouping of special rights that are divisible and that can be used, transferred, etc. in various ways to advance legitimate commercial purposes. Thus, at that level, the law approaches both forms of property in a similar way and (in my view) that is the key level upon which to focus in analyzing the benefits/detriments resulting from IP protection.
Thus, anyone can have knowledge of information but if one's information is not known generally to the world and gives one's company a significant competitive advantage, then it should be capable of having the force of law behind it to enable those who first derived to keep it confidential and to use it for competitive advantage. In this sense, based on a social policy judgment (that protecting proprietary information of this type will facilitate the growth of enterprise and the betterment of society), such information is entitled to special legal protection even though it means that others are thereby excluded from using it for certain purposes.
Again, I don't get into the patent issue and do acknowledge that the questions there are dicier and more subject to debate.
I think you're saying, then, that starting from the question of "are there rights to intellectual property" is the wrong way to go about things; trying to make an argument that "you can't have rights to intellectual property because of X," as many people try to do, is rather myopic since it's demonstrably clear that you can indeed assign rights to IP, since the law does in fact do that, and is able to do so in a way that has a lot in common with other sorts of property rights.
I definitely agree, and that implies that the right question to ask is not "should there be IP rights?" but rather "what rights should be associated with IP?" How you answer those questions depends on your perspective and probably the origin of your country's IP laws (are they explicitly pragmatic, as in the US, or rooted in a theory of natural/inherent rights, as in other countries?), but will undoubtedly involve questions about pragmatism (what's the cost/benefit to society of having a particular type of right) and about fairness or ethics in general.
Starting from that perspective and then arguing why particular rights are either unethical or harmful to society makes for a much more compelling argument than just railing against all IP, as (unfortunately) some activists or commentators tend to do.
The element of commonality that I was stressing had to do with the idea that each form of property was subject to a bundle of rights - granted, to a different bundle in each case but nonetheless to some grouping of special rights that are divisible and that can be used, transferred, etc. in various ways to advance legitimate commercial purposes. Thus, at that level, the law approaches both forms of property in a similar way and (in my view) that is the key level upon which to focus in analyzing the benefits/detriments resulting from IP protection.
Thus, anyone can have knowledge of information but if one's information is not known generally to the world and gives one's company a significant competitive advantage, then it should be capable of having the force of law behind it to enable those who first derived to keep it confidential and to use it for competitive advantage. In this sense, based on a social policy judgment (that protecting proprietary information of this type will facilitate the growth of enterprise and the betterment of society), such information is entitled to special legal protection even though it means that others are thereby excluded from using it for certain purposes.
Again, I don't get into the patent issue and do acknowledge that the questions there are dicier and more subject to debate.