Even the drafter of the U.S. Constitution saw the benefit of a limited copyright. Why should a creator have a "right" to a monopoly on their expression but the public have no right to the benefit of using other's expressions? How does this even make sense when the purpose of copyright has always been understood to be a balancing between encouraging creators with a limited monopoly versus the harm caused to the public by tying up the expression of ideas?
Duke put it better than I could:
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The public domain sounds really valuable, but I’m in favor of intellectual property, is there a contradiction?
Quite the contrary. You’ll be happy to hear that the public domain is a vital, indispensable part of our intellectual property system, and the inputs in the public domain are just as important to its function as the outputs protected by intellectual property. As Judge Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals put it: “Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.” Without the public domain, there would be little to protect with intellectual property rights — if copyright lasted long enough to lock up Shakespeare’s works, much of the literary canon would vanish; if data, theories and formulae were subject to intellectual property protection, then scientific progress would grind to a halt. So the intellectual property system needs both the incentives provided by exclusive rights and the freedoms provided by the public domain, and the key is to find the appropriate balance between them.
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I don't know if I've had a conversation take this kind of hard-left turn since a family relation expressed the belief that the moon landing was faked (I'm not sure if she meant all of the moon landings or just the first one).