>This is a function of a government conferred by the rights of being a citizen.

Woah, woah, woah. Hold up. Which jurisdiction?

Rights are not contingent on Citizenship in the United States. Rights are fundamentally inalienable. They are recognized to exist a priori to an established Government. This is exactly why the Founders wrote the Bill of Rights the way they did, because this is such a seductive way of thinking these things work, and the Tyrant relies on this failing of reasoning to provide the foundation upon which to build their beachhead. The only citizenship-contingent right, is the right to vote. That's it. You can still be represented and hound a Congressional representative as a non-citizen. You just can't participate in the political cluster we call a voting system run by a bipartisan political machine.

Even taxation is not an "exchange" for rights, but rather a concession to the legitimacy of the Government to organize it's affairs so as to be able to successfully do it's job as the Government. Taxes are "voluntary" in the sense that you are the one accepting the onus for being fully compliant. It just happens taxes happen to be an excellent way to strongarm people due to them being coupled to the immediate reality of what we can achieve in life.

Now, back to the topic at hand...

One other power vested in the Federal Congress is to put in place incentives for the furthering of the Arts and Sciences. It is under these auspices that Patents, Copyright, and other matters of Intellectual Property fall.

The controversy around it isn't the legitimacy thing of these things, but rather they've actually in practice incented the advancement of the Arts and Sciences in a world where IP is starting to dwarf actual physical property, and where the analogy to theft completely falls apart. As the world is only enrichened by the sharing of technical know-how, inspired by exposure to the Artist's work.

If you look at the state of progress of the Art's... You still have places like Disney milking old IP for all it's worth. The music industry arguably seems to spend more time trying to counter unfettered spread of the Artist's work than anything else. What of the Sciences? The problem there is access, and people being able to build up to the point they can even phrase the question never before asked. The thing that holds them back is the locking away of the fruits of human knowledge behind the facade of costly obstructions in the form of material duplication and the need to maintain "purity" through gatekeeping of the consumer. SciHub has arguably done more for the advancement of increased access of the layman to the best and brightest; all at no cost or detriment to the researchers in question.

Point being: government, or being subject to it's devices has very little to do with the essential nature of the problem. When duplication doesn't cost a bloody thing; why do we create and enforce, and incent artificial scarcity?

How does that further the Arts and Sciences? Until every man, woman, child, or otherwise is able to deliver novelty to the world without institutional roadblocks, or being harassed into not contributing; we still have an issue, in that our system does exactly that; it discourages innovation because the precondition of being able to deliver and profit is that you have to parse the IP landscape to ensure you aren't stepping on someone else.

Patents and such work for businesses where economic might through collectivization dwarf's the individual's ability to realize the implementation or rewards for having made their thing. They also create that perverse artificial scarcity previously mentioned.

Throw in a ruinously expensive nature of litigation and the legal system, and the oddities introduced through case law, and honestly? I'm not convinced all the trouble caused pays for itself by boosting innovation above the baseline human drive to create.

Anyway... Apologies. Got a bit carried away there.