You're mistaken. "Natural law" refers to intuitive ideas of right and wrong, which is the kind of law Hobbes appeals to in the state of nature. In other words, everyone the world agrees that Bob is in the wrong when he punches Alice and steals her shoes; it does not depend on a local legal system. In contrast, patents protections are arguably counter intuitive, and the feeling that they are just derives from a specific legal system and from the benefits they have for society.
Natural law is an orthogonal concept to the laws of nature (i.e. physics) and to the empirical consequences of stateless societies (e.g. property is often stolen from the weak).
Are you sure that the article and connex ideas (e.g. Rousseau) really have no flavor of "modern humans and their artificial life are evil, while the good old savages and their natural life were much better"? I would connect this trend to some parts of ecology, and I think it is wise to never forget that Mother Nature is "amoral". "She" do not care a bit if hundred of thousands of being suffer and die. We do, and we humans have built ourselves mostly against and despite of nature.
Another example: you can't really have tigers and humans living too close of each other. A part of the work of civilization process has been to kill tigers so to let human offspring live. As much as we may like tigers (so beautiful, and endangered!), we still should prefer humans, right?
The flavor of the article is besides the point. You're using an established term to refer to something completely different, so any discussion you try to have with someone else will be confused, regardless of the merits.
Ok, maybe I blurred a bit between the Natural Law and the Law of Nature. If so, thanks for pointing this out. I am not native speaker.
Then maybe my point still holds: wishing for a life closer to nature, going back to "good old times", removed from all the "artificial institutions" (such as the Law and the State), as emphasised in the article, is not that much of a good idea, if we consider that, in ancient times, life was in average much harder on the weaks and the disabled (and the women, and the enemies, and the different ones).
There are plenty of exceptions. Maybe one can find a time window in some places where e.g. homosexuals were better accepted than right now. But still, these exceptions will not change the big picture, wich was much darker before.
Natural law is an orthogonal concept to the laws of nature (i.e. physics) and to the empirical consequences of stateless societies (e.g. property is often stolen from the weak).