I am not saying that the code should be owned by the client.

I actually do not think that code can be owned.

Code is thought, crystallized in written form. Telling someone that he may not use a particular piece of code is the same as telling him that he may not think that way. Thinking just does not work like this.

Update: I realize that this seems like a pretty negative approach. I will therefore outline what I believe software developers are paid for.

I believe that a software developer is paid for developing software.

In other words, the client does not pay for code, he pays for coding. A teacher is likewise not paid for knowledge, but for teaching.

I don't think you're being negative. I personally do not like the idea that things that can be created cannot be owned. This line of thinking punishes creators and justifies thieves. (Not to say that IP issues are solved in the world or work perfectly.) I think the teacher analogy is false as teaching is, in itself, not a creative act. A sidebar to that: I was a contracted teacher who created a large amount of custom curricula and materials to make my own work much easier. Since this was not a formal part of my job it was considered mine and the school paid me quite a bit of money to keep it, and clean it up a bit for new teachers to use, when my contract ended.

I do think you've hit upon an issue of architect versus craftsman. When I use Moose, as someone else mentioned, I'm not creating as much as crafting. In this trade the lines between architect and craftsman get blurry. I've had patches and bug reports to a couple major kits accepted, and had my code re-used by two Perl luminaries in particular. Does it make me an architect? No-ish...? It's a weird world we live in. I do really like it, though.

(update: fixed a compound word.)

I think you've hit a major point on intellectual property, however there's much more what can be said on this topic.

In the (philosophical) literature on property (what can be owned) there are two main principles what constitutes property, these are scarcity and effort (labor).

For instance jackets are scarce, not just because there are a limited amount of jackets in the world, but because if I take away your jacket, you do not have your jacket anymore. Or if woods are scarce we can make sure that woods will not be exhausted/exploited by making it the property of someone (hoping (s)he will be a good caretaker). Anyway it seems to me that's not the case with intangible property (especially if it's in digital form). My reason for this is if I take away (a copy) of your code, you still have your code. So I think the exact cost of making a copy is irrelevant here.

On the other hand, the principle of effort stands still for intangible property. If you mix your labor with an object (in the lockean sense) that makes the product yours. The product of your work would not exist without your labor. But this reasoning stands for the first copy only, the effort after that is the effort of copying.

So far so good, but... there are a lot of "but"s. Just to mention some:

If digital goods are not scarce (in the technical sense), the legal system of a society still can make it scarce, even with a good reason. That's reflected in most of our legal systems by the fact that intellectual property is a limited right (in time). So to say intellectual property is legitimated by making the creation of IP a profitable business (to encourage the creator by giving this limited right to her/him). However I think it's a sad joke that we're calling life+70 years limited.

Another major point is the (legal) security of property. If someone owns something right now, we should not transform this to something not ownable, because it hurts the interest of many.

Another one is that there were a lot of things considered IP before the time of digital machines and the internet, however at that time the ordinary folks were not able to copy and distribute them en masse.

In the end I think the nature of digital goods is not represented well in most of our legal systems. However I do not expect any serious change in it soon, because the property right is so deeply permeating any of our society that it can change only on the scale of decades or even centuries.

I hope this was not too abstract to make it irrelevant in this thread.

So, it's ok for $BIG_EVIL_COMPANY to take open source code and use it at will, including uses that violate the license? If code cannot be owned, it cannot be protected either.

Note there's a clear analogue with books and movies. Stories cannot be owned. You are allowed to retell a story (there are only a handful of stories anyway, just a gazillion variations). But you cannot copy entire sections of a book, or use parts of someone elses movie in work you "create".

copy/paste isn't thinking, its copy/paste

"Copy/paste isn't thinking, it is copy/paste."

Yes, exactly, and since it takes about 2 seconds, it is worth about 2 seconds of pay. This leaves a lot of developer time for doing something new, and a lot of customer money to pay him for doing it.