[Harmon]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

Not at all. Law does not create physical property. Property existed long before laws. Copyright is an entirely artificial creation.

If you don't understand that it is law is a necessary condition for the existence of "property", you do not understand what law is, or what property is.

Without law, you have only what you are strong enough to keep. If you want to call that "property" you may, but the word has no actual meaning used that way. You cannot speak of "property" without at the same time speaking of law.

There is no basis for a coherent non-religious argument involving the existence of property rights without accepting that law creates those rights. There is, of course, a religious argument that substitutes God-given rights for law, but the curious thing is that such an argument eventually brings you back to the understanding that the manner in which those rights are sustained is through law. Either way, without law, there is no such thing as property rights.

There's no other way to read it, it is flat out a call for eternal copyright.

I thought you said you had read his book. The article is a condensed version of his argument in the book. In the book, he states plainly that he is not arguing for unlimited copyright. So either you are insisting on disregarding context, or you think he argues one thing in the book, and another in the article. Either way, for those of us who consider context, there are two ways to read the article.

If it wasn't for the public domain, Shakespeare might have been forgotten. One reason it is so widely performed is that no one has to pay to perform it.

Shakespeare has made an immense contribution to culture by being in the public domain. If it was under copyright, culture would be strangled

.

On the other hand, because of the lack of copyright, we do not have any accurate version of Shakespeare's plays. If you know anything beyond high school Shakespeare, you know, for instance, that there are two different versions of Hamlet. We are extremely lucky to have any Shakespeare at all, precisely because his works were not protected. Had he had the protection of copyright, we probably would have some of his missing plays, and certainly what we do have would be more authentic.