I, too, hate rentseeking. Owning one's intellectual output, however, is not in and of itself rentseeking.

Rents are just amounts beyond what's needed to cause the thing to exist. At the point of copying something, it already exists.

So payments for the right to do so aren't payments required to bring anything new into existence at that point, save for the legal fiction.

Now you might argue that the future copy-licencing rents are necessary to bring the _original_ creation into being. But that doesn't make them _not rents_.

But I would say that's the second assumption you're baking in here.

As in, we live in a world where e.g. the movie Toy Story exists. Now, certainly Toy Story does provide some good or value to the world. But I don't think you can assume such things provide more value than e.g. open science, free transformation of works, etc.

I get that people enjoy our current IP culture but saying certain things wouldn't exist in an IP-free world is just an argument from consequences that doesn't even really compare consequences between the two.