I've been making my living partially or entirely from "intellectual property" (primarily my words on paper, secondarily computer software) for the better part of two decades now. So why is it that I'm at best lukewarm on the notion of copyright and the idea that somehow these very words are "mine"?
Part of the answer comes from the environment where I wrote my first million or so published words: science-fiction fandom (which, I note peripherally, was also the original home of some prominent Open Source advocates). In fandom, words are the lifeblood of the community, and they seem to quite clearly belong to the community. You can (or could, at the time) get most fanzines for "the usual", a bevy of methods of which the preferred one was to swap your own words.
And of course fans, being inept in so many real world ways, generally didn't know a thing about valid copyrights anyhow.
Fandom led me into doing FACTSHEET FIVE, where suddenly I was selling my own words to other people. So, what did I do about copyright? Well, I did copyright FACTSHEET FIVE, mainly because I didn't want to wake up some day and discover that someone else had reprinted a chunk and copyrighted it. But I always included a reprint statement that granted every reader full and absolute rights to reprint whatever they wanted, with or without attribution.
That's still the way I feel. If you want to link to this web page, that's cool. If you want to copy the words from it and claim you wrote them yourself, well, that's less cool, but I don't really care. There are a lot more words where these came from. If people are coming back to this web site, I presume it's at least in part that they want to read the new words that I come up with.
Now, my published computer books are copyrighted and protected. But that's my publisher's doing, not mine. If you wanted to reprint, say, a whole chapter from VISUAL BASIC DEVELOPER'S GUIDE TO ADO as part of your own book on VB, I'd be happy to grant permission -- but I doubt Sybex would be quite so forgiving. So it goes. At the bottom, I don't think the law has caught up with technology in this area, and I doubt that it will during my lifetime. I expect to see copyrights continue to crumble as it becomes ever-easier to reprint information.
However, I don't expect to stop making a living as a result. If the world doesn't find some way to compensate writers, writing will stop (note that compensation can be delivered in non-monetary terms). But the world doesn't owe me a living writing. If that's the way things go, I'd rather move on to some other occupation than try to use copyright law as a club to force money out of people.