The problem arises not over some strawman of usefulness to society. The problem people have is that equating material property and intellectual property has some pretty serious flaws. It overlooks various attributes an (please excuse the overloading of the term) properties of each that are not shared. These attributes allow for some very different use cases between the two - and using the same words for very different actions is confusing. So while the arguments coming down to definitions may look like semantic wrangling, it is really an attempt to get people to see the different attributes as actually different.