Quote:
Originally Posted by ebusinesstutor
Should Ford have shut down when Henry Ford died?
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Books are not cars.
All else aside, including arguments about first sale, resales, etc., there's one huge difference which puts books (and anything else we can label "intellectual property") into a category all its own: exclusion.
Nobody has an infinite monopoly on
anything. At least, we try to keep them from having one -- there are plenty of laws against it, however badly enforced they sometimes are. Even if the Selden patent had been upheld, there was still a 17-year limitation; after that, anyone who wanted to make a car could. Copyrights on books are essentially patents on words. If someone ... say, the Mitchell estate ... holds a copyright on a certain book, nobody else can publish anything that the copyright-owner's lawyer can prove is infringing -- say,
The Wind Done Gone (which I really wish had gotten beyond the "no injunction, you two work it out" stage and a secret settlement). Ford can't just say "all your cars are belong to us"; they have to keep making better cars. But someone who writes a book doesn't have to keep making better books; they have that book, and anything close to that book. That's why the monopoly has to end: without such an end, eventually there would be a "draw death" of literature, where some future Shakespeare couldn't write
Romeo and Juliet because some past William Painter had already locked that concept down forever. So just as patents are limited monopolies, so are copyrights. Or they should be ... except for the efforts of Disney.