Coca-Cola has built a very valuable business on a secret beverage recipe. To the extent that the Internet spreads, there will be no more secrets in that sense. To preserve shareholder value, it had better turn out that way because they've outsourced everything else, specifically production and distribution. Laws allowing private ownership of property have depended on individual or legal force, often violent. A thief gets his hand cut off.
Laws allowing private ownership of intellectual property are only a couple of hundred years old.
Many people misuse the term copyright as a euphemism for private or secret. Look at the absurdities We live in an Information Age, yet the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles don't account for the knowledge of an organization even though it is often the sole sustainable competitive advantage in a quagmire of inefficiency. Laying off human beings who carry this knowledge may be exactly the wrong strategy, yet the bean counters insist. The Internet is by far the largest systematic violation of copyright law. Copyright violation is built into the very nature of the Internet.