Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
It is interesting, and I find surprising, to see the number of people that don't see abstract creations as a property to be bought and sold and inherited. (Or that's the way I interpret some of the posts here that would, seemingly arbitrarily, strip this property from the current owner, like repossessing a house.)
At first I thought it might be because intellectual property is abstract, and its status as a property is due largely to provisions in law. But then I thought about business. A business may have physical assets, but its actual value is largely abstract, and its status as a property is quite distinct from its physical assets. Few people seem to have trouble with the idea that a business (or shares in a business) is property that can be bought and sold and inherited.
Or is it that people don't like the idea of people earning money for something when they are no longer working for it? (Never mind that the labour may not have been paid for in the first place.) But few people complain about the interest or dividends that they receive on their investments - investments they are happy to buy, sell and leave in their wills. So this can't be it either.
Is it simply that intellectual property can be so easily copied now that people think the value is in the electromagnetic arrangements rather than the abstract concept they represent? Perhaps the logic is that since I can easily have a million copies of something, the value of any one of those copies must be negligible. So here, give me the original and I'll make a million copies, but I'll only read one of them and pay the creator one millionth of the cover price.
None of this is to argue that copyright should be longer or permanent, there are other factors at play, but I do wonder if our view of the value of intellectual property is being unjustly distorted by technology.
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Speaking for myself, none of the above. Copyright (and ownership thereof) should be limited because copyright is a
monopoly, and it is a basic fact of economics that monopolies impose deadweight costs on the economy. The only rationale for allowing such monopoly-costs is to encourage creation of new content. Thus the extent of the monopoly (length of the copyright) should be
limited to the extent that it continues to provide a
substantive additional incentive to create. Individuals generally don't decide on whether to create something based upon the chance of royalties decades hence, and companies generally discount future cashflows that far out sufficiently, so that both can be reasonably ignored as incentives.
Also as technology changes decrease the difficulty, cost and ease-of-detection of unauthorised copying, they raise the deadweight cost of enforcing the monopoly, so act as an argument for further reducing the monopoly (possibly by allowing more generous exceptions for non-commercial copying).
Yes, there are business-related protections of 'abstract properties', trademarks and trade secrets, but both the law and the underlying economic patterns of both are sufficiently different from copyright that it is highly questionable whether they are directly comparable.
That is not to say that I believe that the copyright should not be able to be sold or inherited, just that it should be stringently
limited, both in its duration, and in the generosity of non-commercial exceptions allowed.