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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
That is what I mean by natural state. No ownership of creative ideas.
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That's nice, but there is no "natural state" that applies to books, films, musical recordings, let alone ebooks.
Or do ebooks grow on trees? How did I not notice that?
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Originally Posted by RSE
Now, this is not the most productive way to create invention/ideas/writing. But it is a way. And things do get invented and written. The stirrup. The bridle bit. The heavy plow. The gun. The printing press. The spinning wheel. Steel. The touchstone. The chimney. The water wheel...
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And yet, some inventions were in fact closely held and controlled secrets. Few people are taught the ways of the shamans. Quite a few religions had "mysteries" that were only available to the initiated, such as the Eleusinian mysteries or many gnostic (early Christian) sects. No one bothered to write down the recipe for Greek fire. Guilds placed restrictions on who could produce certain goods, and techniques were often tightly managed. The less people who knew how to decode an encrypted message, the better.
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Originally Posted by RSE
People aren't born with a built-in copyright button.
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People also aren't born with a built-in anti-murder button. The prohibitions against and restrictions on killing other human beings are, per your description, "unnatural." Does that mean we should reject them? Or that we should embrace the "natural" state in which people can kill each other freely?
Or perhaps it's that the concept of "natural" should not be applied to the law, because it's nonsensical as a legal concept.
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Originally Posted by RSE
Ancient Greece didn't have copyright law, nor did Rome (although Rome had a very highly developed legal system), nor to my knowledge, did the Islamic empires (pre 1600).
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Those societies had very low literacy rates, and reproducing content like writings was very costly and time-consuming.
Copyright wasn't necessary until after the *cough* artificial device known as the printing press made it relatively cheap, easy and fast to produce books.
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Originally Posted by RSE
When a piece of property is abandoned, somebody else can claim it and put it to use. During the Dark Ages, the abandoned farms from the late Roman period were simply taked over and used again (the legal term from the times was Assartage.
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Yes, and they did a great job at it. They turned pagan temples into Christian churches, melted down bronze statues, tore down walls for use as building materials, chopped off the noses of statues to express superiority, tore statues and reliefs out of the temples and sold to foreigners on the open market.... Good example.
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Originally Posted by RSE
copyright/patent, even as it is used today, does not let creative works be recopyrighted (reused) once the term is over.
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Actually, that's not entirely correct. The SCOTUS recently ruled to restore the copyright of works that improperly went into the public domain in the US.
It would also be entirely possible to write the laws such that copyright expires without renewals, but to grant the rights holder a grace period of, say, 5 years after expiration to re-establish the copyright. The reason why we don't have this and so rarely see works returned to copyright is because it's highly impractical, and routine use would create confusion over what is or is not PD.
Further, it's not that the expiration of copyright "restores" copyright to its "natural state." The term "natural" is never cited in the Statute of Anne or the Copyright Clause, and is not cited as a concept in the US Copyright Act.
Public domain is the cessation of legal protection, and that's it. It's a beneficial aspect of our society, but ultimately it's as "natural" as physical property rights or protection against fraud -- which is to say "not at all natural."