Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Not true. In fact, patent and copyright laws were drafted specifically to provide incentive to create products that would be mutually productive for society; without those laws, we would have less creativity and fewer products due to the lack of profit incentive, because industrialization makes it too easy to copy others' products/services and steal their potential profits.
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Steve, this get to the nub of the matter. Much of the foundation of this discussion is based on bad metaphors to start with. Copyright is not property (in the classic sense), and using and thinking of it as property leads to a completely false base for thinking and considering. Making more metaphors based on a false metaphor to start with just leads to confusion and propaganda. (And that is the purpose of metaphors in this context - propaganda).
Stop and compare Patent and Copyright. It costs thousands of dollars to obtain a Patent, and you have to prove that it is "new, unique, and not obvious". Copyright, however, is just slap some stuff together and
voila, copyright.
Patent only lasts 20 years, and it used to be a maximum or 34 years. Did the shrinkage reduce inventiveness? Not hardly...
Yet at the same time, copyright got extended, and extended; far beyond the rationale for encouraging creativity.
Herein lies the problem. Patent stays short because it was designed for corporate use; and it is a balancing act. On average, is a corporation better off making money off of it inventions via licensing while paying for everybody's else's patents; or forgoing the licensing money in order to use existing art for free. The balancing point seems to be 20-30 years.
Copyright keeps getting driven longer and longer because the corporations that own our government keep taking it from the public because the public is not protected from them. There is nobody with the resources to push back. Is this good? No,
not even to the corporations doing it! Why? Because they lose the moral foundation of contract with the public. Since they are perceived as stealing from the public, some of the public has no compunction from stealing back. Couple that with technology that is relatively simple, cheap, and widely disseminated, and you have today.
Remember, everything before Dec. 31, 1954, should already be in the public domain. Music, movies, books - all of it. That was what the public contracted for with the patent law of 1909. Bribing Congressmen should not be construed as a moral act...