Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
If you're paid a wage, yeah, it stops when you stop working. But a copyright isn't like working for someone else; it's property that you own.
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Certain corporations have been trying to define content as "intellectual property" partly so they can insist that copying that property constitutes theft, for quite some time, and it appears that some people have bought into it. It's not the same thing, though.
I'm reminded of a case of a cracker from many, many years back who broke into the AT&T administrative system and, as proof he'd been there, copied a manual about setting up phone systems. In court, AT&T declared that the manual was worth -- and he had stolen -- thousands of dollars, as they added up all the time it took someone to write it, type it up, etc. (for reasons I'll leave open to your speculation, they didn't mention that when they sold this manual, it went for $20) They quite deliberately conflated the idea of taking something away from its owner, who then can't use it, and who has hence lost the value of all that staff time doing the writing, with the idea of copying that item, which, if they hadn't found out from other sources, they would never know had happened.
If I photograph your house, have I stolen the house? Obviously not; you're still living there. It would be ridiculous to say I've stolen your house. But mixing the idea of real or chattel property into the equation, and calling the privileges statutorily granted to content creators "property" as if it was no different from a house, makes people think that it's the same. And it isn't. A publisher can't do a print run of 50,000 copies of your house, or sell as many identical e-houses as they have buyers for. Only one person or specific group can use your house at a time. And once the builder sold that house, it's not
his house anymore; he doesn't keep getting paid over and over when you sell the house to me, and I sell it to FizzyWater, and so on. When he stops building houses -- whether he died, or retired, or became a chef instead -- he stops getting paid for houses.
Pensions, life insurance, and so on don't equate either. They're all things that you bought and paid for, and they're paying you back, usually with interest. You can designate a beneficiary for survivor's benefits, but they're still getting paid from (theoretically, at least, unless it's a giant Ponzi scheme) the money you paid in. You may not see it because the payments came from your employer or from your taxes but they're there somewhere. You pay in; it pays you out. It has nothing to do with this situation.
The reason a monopoly on selling a book isn't the same kind of "property" as ownership of a house has to do with the nature of a book: You can duplicate the book without changing the original, or taking its away from the person who owns it. Whether it's a monk in a scriptorium with a quill pen or a person with a computer and a save button, the book is still there; now there are two of them. Or two million of them. That monopoly on sales is granted by legislation of some kind -- in the US, the clause in the Constitution about "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" -- for specific social reasons. It doesn't mention "for the enrichment of the first person to claim authorship" -- it's for the benefit of society as a whole (promotion of progress), and the benefit to an individual is a way of achieving that, by making it possible to make a living as an author.
This was less of an issue before ebooks because a publisher was necessary to the creation and dissemination of a book. Now, however, that's not the case. Shakespeare's plays were not written as ebooks, but you can get them in several versions now; people decided they were important enough to digitize and release. So all of a sudden, since a publisher is not needed, and nobody actually
needs to be paid for the book to be endlessly replicated (whether someone
should be paid is another matter), the whole issue comes to the forefront.
Let's go back to Shakespeare, again, for those of you suggesting perpetual copyright. Shakespeare's plays were not, strictly speaking, original. He used plots, themes, characters, even whole plays, that predated his own work. His genius was in perfecting them, not inventing them. So why should there be a perpetual lock on those plays when, in fact, he drew from that common social well? Why should he have taken out, but not put in, that creative water? And while we're on Shakespeare, he had no living descendants. His line died out in a couple of generations. So who, in that perpetual copyright, should own the rights to his plays?
Some people have this idyllic ideal of the great-grandson of a successful author living the good life on a Caribbean island off the profits from the work of someone he never actually met. The odds are, though, that the ownership of his great-grandfather's work was probably sold to a corporation somewhere along the line by someone who wanted the immediate payout, the same way people take a lump sum in the lottery. He'll have inherited the money, if there was any left, but not the rights to the books. There will be very few of those descendants living the imagined idyllic life, and nearly all books will be in the hands of corporations whose goals are necessarily in direct conflict with the goals of the private citizen. A corporation is not only expected but
legally required to charge as much as possible while delivering as little as possible; individuals, of course, want to pay as little as possible and get as much as possible. In its former implementation, copyright provided that balance by eventually expiring, returning the works to the society from which they derived. With perpetual copyright, they will remain forever in the hands of groups which, remember, are required to take as much of your money as they can and give you as little as possible in return for it. And they, not our hypothetical great-grandson, will be the ones with the rights to the book.
To promote the progress of science and the useful arts (and the useless arts, and the third-rate books that never should have left their creator's word processor), some duration of copyright is necessary. To prevent publishers from acting like vultures, that should extend long enough from creation that waiting for it to expire for a book that the late author wrote last year is not practical. That could be handled by lifetime or publication+X, for some value of X, whichever is longer. If you finished the book 5 minutes before a bus ran you over, it's in copyright for X years; if you wrote it 2X years ago, it goes out of copyright when you die. That protects the statutory privileges (the monopoly) of the author, and it protects the rights of society. There is balance.