> Perhaps not prohibited. But we could make it so they lose all IP rights.
I'm not sure how that would work. Suppose I make two draft comics of my original character ExampleMan. One features a dark brooding morally ambiguous anti-hero, and the other is a wholesome family character.
Are you saying if I destroy one draft and publish the other, the character comes partially or wholly into the public domain? Or that I am prohibited from claiming the time and money used to make one of the drafts as the legitimate business expense?
Would same logic also apply to a patents of a company that creates 10 different prototype engine designs, and decides to only bring one of them to market?
Good points. Normally, your discarded drafts are just written off as the cost of creating the keeper. It's not worth anyone's time to put them all out for bid.
However, for a really big project, there's a "salvage value" or "scrap value." It's not zero.
You can't have your cake and eat it. If you want to use copyright protection, you should only be able to do so after making your work public.
If you then destroy your original work or refuse to let other people use it on reasonable terms, you can't sue people for copyright infringement when they use it.
> Would same logic also apply to a patents of a company that creates 10 different prototype engine designs, and decides to only bring one of them to market?
I think you shouldn't be able to use patent protection unless you also make your design available on the market for a reasonable fee.
Do those 10 engines have ten different patents? Then definitely take away 9 of those patents if they won't use them or FRAND license them.
If all the prototypes were for the same patent, there's no issue.
For the draft comics, I think you could pretty well argue those are part of the same work. And I'd be okay excluding projects under a certain size from the rule.
To take it to the primitive level, the thing in your grasp is in your grasp and not in else's. "Intellectual" property is really not like that at all altho we spend tremendously on legal artifice and violent enforcement to make it so.
Many animals are extremely social - they'll attack you for taking the group's resources, they won't necessarily have any individual resources. At the extreme end you have things like ants with no individuality, but you also have social mammals that are more group-oriented than individual-oriented.
If you look at anthropology pre-modern humans were extremely family/tribe oriented. Resources were generally the property of the tribe as a whole. I don't think that the modern understanding of personal property would translate well to someone from such a culture, which makes me sceptical of the idea that personal property is an innate element of human nature.
Perhaps not prohibited. But we could make it so they lose all IP rights.
Copyright is intended to promote the creation and distribution of new works. It is not a natural human right, like ownership of your physical things.