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Originally Posted by pwalker8
Gosh, you're right. I guess that's why we didn't have authors or books before copyright and why no one made any money on books until copyright was extended world wide back in the early 1970's.  |
Yeah, there were books before copyright. Artists, too. But the artists couldn't make a living from the sale of their books; they were dependent on being independently wealthy, having a patron, or receiving a sinecure with few duties and time for writing. And very few books were printed at this time - maybe 1000 titles in English per year, with the vast majority being religious tracts and less than 20 being works of fiction. Only after copyright could authors live off of their work as authors.
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The problem is the the idea of "IP" (a term that was coined by a lawyer to make the concept that someone could own an idea more palatable to a jury) has been stretched far beyond the basic premise that artists and inventors should get just compensation.
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Why make stuff up? The modern use of the term "intellectual property" goes back to the Swiss Office of Intellectual Property (its patent/copyright/trademark bureau), which was established in the 1880's. It has nothing to do with juries. Switzerland doesn't even *have* juries.
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Perhaps the idea of copyright should be abandoned, and we should simply go to a model of the artist and inventor getting a share of the net revenue from the use of their work or idea rather than getting control over the use of their work or idea. That would be more inline with the stated justification of copyright and patents.
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I'm not sure how this would work in practice - if authors had no power to control how their work was used, they wouldn't have much negotiating power. And if you couldn't grant exclusive movie rights, for example, I think it would be risky to invest millions to make a movie.