In the United States, many people teach that intellectual property is equivalent to real property. By intellectual property I mean property you can transfer over a telephone line; by real property I mean property you can drop on your foot.
An alternative definition considers property as that which can be taken from you. For example, if you have a car and it can be taken from you, it is property.
The first definition, that intellectual property is equivalent to real property, means that if you are a capitalist who owns a factory, you are permitted to employ that means of production if and only if you also own or have a right to the intellectual property defining what is produced.
The second definition means that an owner or organizer of a means of production, a capitalist or an entrepeneur, is permitted to manufacture and attempt to sell whatever is not banned for other reasons. This second definition makes it easier to run a competitive, free market, which is the kind of organization of society for which the moral arguments favoring capitalism apply. The less competitive a market, the more immoral it becomes (according the standard arguments of basic economics courses -- basically, it is held to be immoral to take something of value from a person without recompense).
My own experience is that few people who own or have access to computers think of themselves as owners of a means of production; and few are bothered that they or (more practically speaking) others are forbidden to go into the software manufacturing business, except under social arrangements that require them to take something of value from other people without recompense.
Indeed, my experience is that many people hardly notice the circumstance, which indicates the strength of the concept of property that you can drop on your foot and the weakness of the desire for competitive, free markets.
You can use yourself as a test subject: did you find it easy to follow what I just wrote? Or have you found it somewhat strange that I am attempting to separate types of property and weird that I am claiming that the lack of separation detracts from the moral arguments for capitalism in a competitive, free market?
Let me put this another way:
Several commonly used software programs are partially-non-competitive. This is not because people are prevented by a government or by geography from buying alternatives -- they can buy the alternatives. The programs are partially non-competitive because enough people fail to make the investments necessary to choose.
As a practical matter, people often do not invest in learning about products. Nor do they invest in learning how to use different ones. In years past, they compared MS-DOS programs to typewriters, not to other programs. In the present, they compare one windowing system to its predecessor, not to alternatives. The barriers are sociological, not a legal or geographical.
Unfortunately for consumers in a somewhat non-competitive market, the cause does not matter; the consequences do: more profit to the somewhat-of-a-monopolist and less benefit for the buyer
The software I am using, Debian GNU/Linux as operating system, GNU Emacs for mail, editing, newsreading, web browsing, etc. are protected under a license that ensures that anyone can manufacture them. And since every one who owns a computer owns a software factory, a great deal of competitive manufacture and marketing goes on.
Of course, since owning a software factory is much more common than owning an automobile factory, and since manufacturing a car is harder than manufacturing an instance of software, the latter is called copying and often not even perceived as manufacturing. Also, since the US Constitution provides an indirect subsidy to investors through the copyright and patent laws, To promote the progress of science and useful arts, people tend to forget that the usual operation of copyright and patent laws is to create government-coerced, partial monopolies for certain groups at the expense of everyone else.
But when you pierce the fog, it turns out, at least for something like software, that a competitive, free market really does help the consumer (not producers, of course); and, exactly as economists say, a competitive, free market encourages cooperation, so some ignorant people inside such a market think they are following socialism!
Producers, as you would expect from reading Adam Smith, are much against a competitive, free market since it reduces their profits and because you have to operate differently when funding the development of the first copies of programs. You have to work harder when competing then when enjoying even the least bit of market restriction.
But consumers win.
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