[Worldwalker]

I've never argued in favor of an end to copyrights, though it seems that my comments about their beginning have convinced some people that the issue is binary -- we should either have no copyrights or perpetual copyrights. My argument, however, is that copyrights have not been necessary to allow for writing, and increasingly extended copyrights have not produced equally better writing.

Note: for all examples, I am going to use a person who lives to the Biblical "threescore and ten" (70 years) and a work this person wrote at the age of 30, to make everything equal.

A hundred years ago in the US, copyright was 56 years, in two 28-year terms. If the same work is written today, copyright will last 110 years. That's approximately twice the length of copyright, so we should expect works written today to be, on average, twice as good as works written 100 or more years ago. I'm not seeing that. There are good books written today, certainly, but they're not twice as good as books of 100 or more years ago. Authors don't seem to have gotten any better; good authors are still good, and bad authors are still bad, and the major effect of cheap publishing seems to have been to enable more of the latter to broadcast their books, with commensurate effects on the signal to noise ratio. The good-writing end of the curve has remained relatively the same.

As for the argument that hundred-plus-year copyright is necessary because authors would not write (or write as much) without it, let me ask you this: When you make a financial decision, do you make it with consideration of yourself, and possibly your children? Or do you take into consideration people who will not even be born until after you and your children are dead? Do you choose a career, for example, based on what will be of the greatest benefit to those people you will never see?

We can't use the same rules for copyright that we do for land because copying a book is not like selling land. If I want a patch of land, that is exclusive ownership; nobody else can have an identical patch of land. But if I want a book, everyone in the would could make a copy of it without taking it away from me. This happens all the time; how many other people have exactly the same ebook as you just bought? I can sell a patch of land once, but I can sell a book a hundred or a thousand or a million times. Despite the best efforts of the people who coined the phrase "intellectual property" to try to equate it to real property, it's not. It's a different thing. This was acknowledged by those "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" people when they established a temporary monopoly for works that met that standard.

If anything, intellectual property (despite being a deliberate misnomer) and its owners gets a much better deal than real property. If I make bookcases, my ability to make money from those bookcases ends when my life ends. My heirs might sell off my last few bookcases, but that's it. They have the use of the money I earned from selling bookcases in my lifetime, but they don't inherit some right to be paid every time any bookcase I ever built is sold. So why is it that if I make books, why should my heirs get, in addition to the money I earned from selling books, a right to be paid every time those books are sold? And why should people born a hundred years after I wrote my last book continue to have control over, and income from, that book, when people who were born a hundred years after I built my last bookcase wouldn't have such control?

Authors should have control over their works within their own lifetimes (though personally, the twice 28 years thing would have been good enough). Giving their great-great-grandchildren such control is not necessary for the interests of the author, and it is harmful to the interests of the public.

So why the laws, and the lobbying? Simple: John Doe doesn't care what happens to his writing 100 years in the future; the Disney Corporation does (or, rather, cares about the present status of corporate works from the past). They blow smoke. They talk about "the good of the authors". They have shills and astroturfers and foundations. But it's not about individuals, or about authors, at all. They know that authors are no more concerned about their great-great-grandchildren making money off their books than carpenters are about their great-great-grandchildren making money off their bookcases. But Disney, and those like Disney, want to keep making money off things their corporate ancestors created, and that is what has driven the ever-increasing extension of copyright laws, to the point where "for a limited time" has lost any and all meaning.

Remember: copyright itself is an artificial thing, instituted by legislative decision. The default condition is not perpetual copyright but no copyright. The decision was made to let the camel's nose into the tent, and now the corporations with a major stake in the situation are saying "but the camel has always had the best right to the tent; if it hadn't, would they have let its nose in?" The man clinging to the door as he is being pushed out by the camel is pleading, in vain, that he wanted a compromise, not surrender.

Incidentally, as both a producer and buyer of copyrighted works, I think creation+50 or life of the author, whichever is longer, is entirely enough. The creation+50 would prevent vultures from hanging around dying authors.