Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
I personally see no difference between intellectual property and tangible property. If an author has to give up his rights 70 years after death, then so should a farmer. If society benefits from a book entering public domain, then society will also benefit when a farm enters public domain.
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And yet, differences there are:
1. Tangible property is pretty much fungible (unless it's a work of art or protected by a patent). IP is not. So, monopoly over IP is monopoly over a unique product. To make my point, think of somebody owning the Grand Canyon or entire Mississippi. Which leads us to the second point.
2. PD is a building block for something new. There would be great harm to artistic creation without PD. Think of what would be of Disney without the following PD works: Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Alice in Wonderland, the Nutcracker, the Jungle Book (Disney released their version exactly 1 year after the expiration of the copyright). Most of music in Fantasia was PD. Did the society benefit from Disney using PD? Yes. Did Disney benefit from PD as well? Yes. Should Disney be interested in keeping PD alive? Yes... that is if they want to create something new; not just bring out their old stuff from their vault to resell it on a new medium.
What would be of our literature without Shakespeare in the public domain. Shakespeare would not be able to write many of his works without PD (Romeo and Juliet taken from Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke, historical plays taken from Chronicles of England by Raphael Hollingshead). The movie/cartoon/music/publishing industries would not be the same. They take but don't want to give.
3. Taking a farm away from the farmer is depriving him or his heirs of the farm (i.e. he will have no farm). Releasing copyrighted works into public domain does not deprive the author or his heirs of the works. Moreover, IP is a legal fiction (i.e. legal creation). There would be no IP without IP statutes that were invented in 18th century (see the Statute of Anne of 1710). Ownership of tangible property has been with us as long as man existed. Ownership of tangible property is an innate concept that you do not need to explain to anyone even in communist countries (they fight it but it's a battle that they always invariably lose). To explain IP ownership, you need a constant bombardment of airwaves and weird ads at the beginning of DVDs. In legal parlance, theft of tangible property is a
malum-in-se crime, while theft of IP is a
malum-prohibitum crime. No amount of reeducation of the populace will help to change it.
4. Finally, Disney laws have made mockery of the U.S. Constitution (and Supreme Court decisions on this topic) and brought our legal system into ridicule and disrepute among the people (as in "We the People). Congress's blatant preoccupation with interests of moneyed "constituencies" (Disney et al.) to the detriment of the public interest shows that there are laws that are not people's laws, they are lobbyists' laws. In other words this is another proof that Congress is beholden to special interests.