New Zealand bans some software patents

Yes. Basically, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem.

Do not conflate copyright infringement with plagiarism, they are entirely orthogonal. You can plagiarize work without violating a copyright. You can violate a copyright while giving full credit.

"I mean, would you be okay if I took your work, erased your name, and slapped mine in its place?"

In fact that happens all the time with work-for-hire copyrights. Anyone who works as a programmer for Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. can expect to receive no credit for their creative work, only a pay check for having done it. Think of all the independent contractors out there who write software for big corporations, get paid, and get neither recognition nor credit for their work.

Take a look at movie and music sharing on the Internet, and what you will see is that plagiarism is almost entirely absent. Nobody is claiming credit for some musician's work when they share that musician's recordings online. That is probably copyright infringement (whether a particular act even constitutes infringement is determined by a courtroom battle), but it is not at all plagiarism.

The history of copyright is important here, because it explains things that otherwise make no sense at all. If copyright is about plagiarism, why is there no requirement that credit be given the actual author / artist / creator of covered works? If copyright is about paying creative workers, why is it that the vast majority of artists need to work a second job? The answer is that copyright is about neither plagiarism nor paying artists; it is and has always been about business and government interests. The reason publishers, recording studios, movie studios, and so forth have become so disproportionately wealthy by comparison with the people whose works they sell is that copyright as a system was designed with industry in mind.

Your original claim was that copyright is the legal embodiment of a widely held moral belief or of some generally held value. I am asserting that this is as untrue in the 21st century as it was in the 17th century. Copyright continues to be a system that is design for and which favors certain industries; artists are a secondary concern, just as they were when the Stationer's company lobbied for the Statute of Anne.

Finally, plagiarism is readily solved with technology; copyright infringement is inherently unsolvable. The solution to plagiarism is watermarking, embedding a hard-to-remove message in images/audio/video/text that identifies the creator (technical details omitted). This was studied in the 80s and 90s and at one time it was believed that there might be a market for such technology, as a way to combat plagiarism on the Internet. In the end, though, it worked out that plagiarism is not so important as long as everyone is being paid; copyright became the important issue online, with plagiarism being a secondary and far less important concern.

In this case, intellectual property "rights" are not natural rights because they are neither essential for a free society nor essential to the survival of an individual. My objection is exactly that intellectual property rights do not quack like natural rights and that legal terminology (and eventually laws themselves) should respect that.

Referring back to the U.S. Constitution, a limited monopoly was granted "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". No one would argue that those aren't noble goals, but one wouldn't be oppressed if his patents and copyrights were violated.

If one's home or savings were stolen or unfairly confiscated on the other hand...

If you want to talk programming, it is a design bug to label patent monopolies as "intellectual property rights" because the "property rights" abstraction does not fit the idea of limited monopoly powers. Because, among other reasons, violations of "property rights" have side effects of a different kind and magnitude than a failure to respect monopoly privileges.

You just reiterated your previous statement without addressing my point.

According to you, it is morally OK for government to decide what is a right and what isn't. In that case, is there anything morally wrong with government deciding to nationalize all retirement savings?

AFAICS we just have different priorities in what we want the terminology to do. You're prioritising the impression that the term "intellectual property" creates in a layman, i.e. that it calls to mind an analogy (with tangible property) that is in many ways misleading. I'm prioritising the technical accuracy of it as a legal term per common law definitions of proprietary right.

So I think we'll just have to agree to disagree here, based on our different sets of priorities.

(As for debts, in English law they are choses in action, and so intangible moveables. See e.g. Lord Goff's comments in Lipkin Gorman v Karpnale [1991] 2 AC 548, p. 574 at [A]. So a debt isn't quite a purely contractual right: the difference is between a claim in debt, e.g. an action for the price, and a claim for damages. The former will often allow some kind of proprietary remedy - e.g. a lien over goods if the debt is from a sale of those goods, the ability to trace your title to the debt into other people's pockets (as in Lipkin, which was a purely personal action for unjust enrichment), or in some circumstances even a full-blown constructive trust (e.g. in a Chase Manhattan v Israel-British Bank type situation). The latter never will.

That said, I did perhaps choose a bad example, as the line can be a thin one. A better example of a property right that doesn't give you a monopoly might've been be an easement. (Freehold covenants are another interesting example, as starting in the mid-19th century, they've sortof morphed from purely being personal, contractual rights into being property rights)).