alt Hacker Newswhat is a right that has existed since time immemorial? Generally rights that have existed "forever" are codified rights and, in the codification, described as being eternal. Hence Jefferson's reference to inalienable rights, which probably came as some surprise to King George III.
on edit: If we had a soundtrack the Clash Know Your Rights would be playing in this comment.
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Copyright originates in the Statute of Anne[0]; its creation was therefore within living memory when the United States declared their independence.
No rights have existed 'forever', and both the rights and the social problems they intend to resolve are often quite recent (assuming you're not the sort of person who's impressed by a building that's 100 years old).
George III was certainly not surprised by Jefferson's claim to rights, given that the rights he claimed were copied (largely verbatim) from the Bill of Rights 1689[1]. The poor treatment of the Thirteen Colonies was due to Lord North's poor governance, the rights and liberties that the Founding Fathers demanded were long-established in Britain, and their complaints against absolute monarchy were complaints against a system of government that had been abolished a century before.
at any rate rights that are described as being eternal or some other version of that such as inalienable, or in the case of copyright moral and intrinsic, are rights that if the government, that has heretofore described that as inviolate, where to casually violate them then the government would be declaring its own nullification to exist further by its previously stated rules.
Not to say this doesn't happen, I believe we can see it happening in some places in the world right now, but these are classes of laws that cannot "just" be changed at the government's whim, and in the EU copyright law is evidently one of those classes of law, strange as it seems.
Except of course that the point is that copyright is generally not described this way.
See my more extensive overview in another response.
The history of copyright law is one where it is regularly described either in the debates around the passing of the laws, or in the laws themselves, as a utilitarian bargain between the public and creators.
E.g. since you mention Jefferson and mention "inalienable", notably copyright is in the US not an inaliable right at all, but a right that the US constitution grants Congress the power to enact "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". It says nothing about being an inalienable or eternal right of citizens.
And before you bring up France, or other European law, I suggest you read the other comment as well.
But to add more than I did in the other comment, e.g. in Norway, the first paragraph of the copyright low ("Lov om opphavsrett til åndsverk mv.") gives 3 motivations: 1 a) to grant rights to creators to give incentives for cultural production, 1 b) to limit those rights to ensure a balance between creators rights and public interests, 1 c) to provide rules to make it easy to arrange use of copyrighted works.
There's that argument about incentives and balancing public interests again.
This is the historical norm. It is not present in every copyright law, but they share the same historical nucleus.