Yeah I didn't even think that was controversial. I'd always been taught that copyright and patents exist to explicitly restrict what people can do by granting a monopoly to the owners in order to encourage invention and creative work.

Edit to add I'm not saying I agree with the justification or am trying to argue for it, only that the point above is commonly raised as the justification, implying that the intrusion on a person's rights is known and accepted.

Natural rights are a fiction to pretend that someone’s moral code is a privileged aspect of physical reality in a way every competing moral code is not.

That's going a bit far. They're just fictions that are privileged over certain other fictions--it's like how you can often cast magic missile in D&D but you can't usually cast expelliarmus, it comes down to which fiction we agree to inhabit.

Even so, you can ask whether a given moral code is more principled than another (e.g. in the sense of having some algebraic structure), and use that to investigate what might be considered "more natural". For example, one might argue that if a "natural" right exists, then it ought to be symmetric under exchange of humans (or sentient beings or whatever). It's then "more natural" to conclude that you have a right to perform actions that have no interaction or consequences for other humans (e.g. to sing a copyrighted song to yourself in an empty room or downloading a song that you already have on CD but don't feel like ripping yourself) than those that do (e.g. taking food from someone because you'd otherwise starve).

> Even so, you can ask whether a given moral code is more principled than another

What does “more principled” mean of a moral code? How does one quantify “degree of principledness”?

> and use that to investigate what might be considered "more natural".

What does the preceding (being “more principled”) have to do with being “more natural”? And what significance does being “more natural” have?

And none of that has any relevance to what is usually described as “natural rights”; its like taking existing words and coming upnwith entirely novel meanings and then a whole architecture around them, which is pretty advanced equivocation.