Missing the point of "intellectual property"

There's a Yahoo mailing list I lurk on devoted to medieval woodworking. It's a pretty good-natured list, with a good mix of experienced woodworkers and newbies, and the moderator rarely has had to step in to cool things down. Until recently.

A lot of the members of the mailing list are SCA and/or Ren Faire artisans, a good number of whom sell their products to supplement their income. The topic of intellectual property was introduced last week and a raging firestorm of controversy broke out . . . okay, a comparative firestorm for this list, anyway.

The purists are, as you would expect, demanding that intellectual property be respected and that no woodworker use the designs of another without at least acknowledgement (and, for professionals, compensation). Their opponents are insisting that there's no way for these things to be policed and anyway, nobody is earning a living wage making these reproductions.

And there's the elephant in the living room: most of the works in discussion are reproductions — to greater or lesser degrees of accuracy — of original works that are hundreds of years old. Can you say "public domain"?

Actually, I'm exaggerating a bit . . . but it amused me no end to see the terms "copyright", "patent", and "intellectual property" bandied around when the very idea of originality is not in question.