Code is not physical property

The problem with patenting or copyrighting code is that copy-pasting already optimized pieces of code is common practice for building your program. Having to do everything from scratch each time while having to make small changes so it doesn't step into a patent would be annoying and a hindrance to the work of programmers.

Sure, but making it possible or convenient to copyright code need not involve presuming all code is copyrighted. That's actually a relatively recent feature of copyrighting media. It didn't use to be that if you wrote a book you had an assumed copyright to it, you had to register for one.

And at least in this case, the code in question wasn't freely available to be copied. My comment was more about comparative systems of intellectual property rather than protected versus not.

So to rephrase, if you want intellectual property over code, what is the best way for society to enable that?