[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by carpetmojo

I too want to read every book for free, but no income = no (professional) writers, for a start (apart from committed souls in a garrett, naturally) which would be a, well, difficult state of affairs.

While there are people suggesting that copyright be done away with completely (I'm sure there's a corollary of Rule 34 about this), that is not the general case. Most people just think copyright should be limited, and 150 years or so is not sufficiently limited. Actually, most people who do not work for (or get their ideas from) Disney seem to think that.

Looking at the past, not counting the days before copyrights existed at all, we see no shortage of professional writers when copyrights were limited. When copyrights in the US were 28 years, and could be renewed for another 28 years, people wrote. The inability to provide income to their great-great-grandchildren did not seem to stop Twain, Voltaire, or Dickens, for example.

The copyright on a literary work (or anything else) is not the same as the ownership of a physical object. As evidence, consider the US Constitution.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Clearly, there is an intent to distinguish between physical objects and copyrights. Were there not, that could have been made simpler and clearer just by saying "The Creations of Authors and the Designs of Inventors shall be considered in all ways the Equivalent of physical Objects." No ambiguity, no questions, a book is just the same thing as a bookcase.

So why is that? The simplest reason is that no book is an island. Shakespeare's plays, for instance, did not spring full-formed from his head; they were based on -- and often perfections of -- other plays that existed at the time, going back generations, and of stories and histories going back centuries. Shakespeare drew from the common well -- that body of literary work that is the heritage of all of us -- and in time, his work returned to it. That is true of all writing, good and bad.

As for continuing payments, there's something else missing there: let's say someone is a carpenter as well as an author. He writes books, and he builds bookcases. For the sake of discussion, we'll say roughly half his income comes from each aspect of his business. Selling books makes him about as much money as selling bookcases does. The writing of a book, therefore, is much like the building of a bookcase. Sure, one book will get more money from a publisher than one bookcase will from a store, and you can build a lot of books in the time it takes you to build one bookcase, but that's just a matter of time: it's faster to build a little bookstand to go on a desk, too, than to build a wall-sized, elaborately-decorated shelving unit. So we have this writer and carpenter. When he sells a bookcase, he's sold it. He doesn't get more money when the buyer sells it to someone else. If you buy one of his bookcases at my yard sale, I don't have any obligation to track him down and send him additional payment for his bookcase. As far as any income to his heirs, his great-great-grandchildren will not be receiving payments for the repeated reselling of bookcases he built.

You're correct in that the written word is not any different from at least four of the six items you list. But that's because they're basically the same thing. A painting's reproduction, performances of a play, a medical breakthrough, and an inventor's patent are all covered by statutorially-created rights: two copyrights, two patents. Saying "copyrights are like copyrights" is tautologically true, but not very illuminating. The other two are real estate, which has its own collection of rights, but which is quite different from a book. Patents, by the way, expire far sooner than copyrights -- and yet people don't seem to be inhibited from inventing things.

Here's one way in which they're different: Let's say that I own a building and I write a book. My ownership of that building, no matter who I rent it to, doesn't affect your ownership of any building you own. You don't even need to know or care that I own a building; you just rent yours. We may own, let's say, identical Philadelphia rowhouses, but that doesn't affect either one of us. On the other hand, if you're also in the writing business, my book does affect you. You can't write a book exactly like mine. As various cases have shown, especially those swirling around Harry Potter (both the Nancy Stouffer case and various Russian copies are instructive) you can't even get close.

Unlike buildings or bookcases, books never go away. Were copyright to be perpetual, every possible story would eventually be locked up by some owner. Nobody could ever do anything better. For example, if Il Pecorone had been locked away from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice could never have been written. If The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet had been unavailable to Shakespeare, not only the play but subsequent movies, West Side Story, and many other works could never have existed (by the way, Shakespeare has no living descendants; even if we were supposed to pay his estate after all these centuries, who would we pay?) In more modern creatino, if Nancy Stouffer had proven her case (instead of being sanctioned by the court for intentional fraud!), the Harry Potter books, and everything connected to them (including the many thousands of jobs thereby created) would have been forever blocked by the existence of a piss-poor story about some glowy radioactive guys ... forever. And it would just keep increasing. Consider the concept of "draw death" in chess -- the idea that eventually every possible combination of moves would be so well analyzed that neither player could ever win, because their opponent would always follow a line of moves that led to a draw. In a simpler form, consider two skilled tic-tac-toe players: neither will ever win. Now expand that to all possible books -- remember, because you don't have to use the exact words ... consider The Wind Done Gone ... just being in the general ballpark would count as infringement. Sooner or later, every concept would have an owner, and writing new books would become virtually impossible.

That's why rights to books are not the same as rights to real estate, or even to furniture, and they can't be.