> That is because they want credit for the idea. Give them credit and share it freely, and most people will not complain, even if they never intended for their ideas to be shared by millions of people (many will be happy with the fame, even if they don't see millions of dollars for it -- again, as long as they are getting credit, or at least as long as nobody else gets the credit).

It goes far beyond credit. Find a popular restaurant with an original shtick, set up a copy, and see if proper attribution changes the degree to which you've pissed off the owner of the original.

Do a thought experiment. Do you remember the episode of "Big Bang Theory" where Penny comes up with the idea to sell Penny Blossoms (little hair accessories)? See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF-0qn_-TAo

Imagine this hypothetical: someone else sees Penny Blossoms, copies the idea and the name, and makes a ton of money selling their copy mass-produced by Chinese labor. What is Penny's reaction in this hypothetical? Is she excited to see her ideas be disseminated, or pissed off that someone else is making money off her idea? Does attribution change that reaction?

> Only people who want to exploit ideas for profit use terms like "intellectual property"

"Intellectual property" exists because people believe, very strongly, in the right to profit from their own ideas to the exclusion of others. People perceive it as "unfair" when someone else makes money off their idea. The Apple versus Samsung case is a really great example. The case didn't happen because certain patents existed. The case happened because Samsung released products that looked a lot like iPhones, and Apple (Jobs) felt ripped off. If patents didn't form the basis of the suit, Apple would have found something else--the feeling of being ripped off came first, the law came after.

> That is because the rest of us have not been brainwashed to the point of thinking that copying things is a destructive activity.

You're wildly confused about whether the chicken or the egg came first. Perceptions about the protection of ideas predate "all that money donated by Hollywood and the recording industry, all their lobbying, all the revolving door politics..." Obviously copyright and patent date back to before the Constitution, but even in contexts where neither copyright nor patent apply, there has been a strong theme of people wanting to protect intangible property. Usually these come up in the context of "misappropriation" or "unfair competition." In many respects, the protection of ideas under the current law is much narrower than what people thought should be the case historically. It was popular (though never the law), for a long time, to appeal to a "labor theory of copyright" where people thought facts or news should be protectable if they took effort to collect or gather. There is a strong conceptual appeal to the idea that if one spends effort creating something, whether tangible or intangible, one owns and should be able to control it. It's a manifestation of our monkey selves.

Another good example is analyst stock recommendations/price targets. These are clearly facts/opinions and not protected by any intellectual property regime (an attempt to extend protection to them under a misappropriation theory was struck down by the Second Circuit recently). But even though the law doesn't protect these recommendations, people genuinely feel ripped off when aggregator sites repost analyst recommendations. They feel it is unfair that someone should be able to profit by simply reposting something that required them to undertake extensive research and analysis. It's very much a "there should be a law!" sort of feeling.