I understand the concept. I read your link and followed the internal link on the length of ownership. I've also hunted down some of what Rand said on the subject -- although I certainly won't pretend to have read everything.

The problem I am having is that Rand and others utterly reject the use of force. I certainly like that idea and certainly prefer a philosophy of free people voluntarily trading goods and services. But another, more important principle is that there is an objective reality. This is so important that it gives the name to the philosophy. And the objective reality is that most of the land in the world was acquired by and is maintained by force. Rand accepts force to maintain property rights but not to acquire it in the first place.

In trying to deny the existence of that force we have such things as saying the Indians didn't really own the land since their mode of ownership wasn't the same as ours. This ignores the fact that soldiers had to shoot them to drive them off of it so that settlers could put the land to productive use. I find the historical use of force distasteful but have to accept the reality that it happened and shaped the world to follow.

Once the government had acquired control of the land (leaving aside the whole government ownership subject) it was free to set up rules to hand the land out to people who were going to make productive use of it.

How did they acquire property rights in the thing you bought?

The original owner of the land (proper government) gets property rights because they do something to make the land productive, such as farm it. (See Homestead Act, Mining Rights, etc) If you buy the land from them, then you had to do something else productive and then of course under property rights you can trade what you have produced for the land.

I am having a hard time reconciling the concept that you acquire and maintain property rights by making something productive. This seems at odds with reality in that you cannot make property productive until you acquire property rights in it by purchasing it from the previous owner. And if you purchase land and do nothing with it you still maintain the property. That may be an attribute of our legal system but I find it hard to envision a practical world in which any asset you let become idle can be taken over by someone else. If you go on an extended vacation will you find your car gone when you get back because you weren't being productive with it?

But, for the purposes of patents and copyrights, if we accept the view that ownership depends on productivity than what about the so called "patent trolls" who do not productively use the patents to make anything but instead use them to extort money from people who are trying to productively make things?