Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff L
But if you walk into a book store, a copy of Melville still costs you money, meaning the publisher is making money, the retailer is making money, the distributor, the printer, and everyone else along the supply chain, everyone except the family of the author.
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All of whom, apart from the family of the author, are actually doing something to make that physical book exist.
Quote:
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What other kind of property disappears like intellectual property. If you put money in a bank, buy a bond or shares in a company, or buy land, houses, or gold, all of that persists. You can leave all of that to your estate for the express purpose of benefiting your family. But you can't leave intellectual property, or rather you can leave it with the understanding that it'll vanish when the clock strikes twelve.
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Two things:
1) Nearly all those examples can as easily (all but) disappear. The bank could go bust, the company you invested in could fail, there could be an environmental disaster near or on the land that makes it unsellable, the price of gold could fall through the floor. More likely in some cases than others and unlikely to wipe out all the value but still possible.
2) Maybe this is all a hint as to why thinking of copyright as intellectual "property" is at best a simplification and sometimes misleading.
Intellectual property is an artificial construct. It exists because we as a society have decided it is a good thing. You have to create laws to make it exist. You have to create restrictions on what people would normally do naturally and without thinking - copy and share. Unlike physical property - which to some extent is artificial too - there's no natural attribute like possession. I can physically fence off land, or lock my gold in a safe. Once I've done that it's "my property" because no-one else can have access to it unless I give it to them. With intellectual property that's not the case. If I write a novel and publish it I can only restrict who gets a copy with some sort of compulsion on others (i.e. the backing of law). And one person having a copy doesn't stop someone else having a copy, there's no natural "one place at a time" like there is with physical objects.
Once you accept that it's artificial then you can start asking whether it's still useful. It didn't always exist. Maybe it won't in the future. I think it still should. I think the terms should be shorter. I'm not sure how short though tbh.
I quite like the idea of an initial fixed term which is then renewable at intervals with increasing fees, so that the incentive to allow it back into public domain at some point increases over time. But I can see problems with that too.