There's a new paper our (
here) that argues that copyright terms should be reduced and that copyright shouldn't be a component of international "trade" agreements like the TPP.
From the paper:
Quote:
Economic efficiency and constitutional law both suggest copyrights should serve to solve potential market failures, to “promote the progress of the sciences.” In examining how long the specific terms for copyright and patent should be, Milton Friedman deemed the subject a matter of “expediency”to be determined by “practical considerations.”
...
This report does not argue that copyright should be abolished, but the founders were clear that these monopolies had associated costs. Policy-makers want there to be incentive for content creation and some artistic works would never have been created without the ability to profit from those works. But we must also acknowledge that, at a certain point, there is no more cognizable additional incentive to extending copyright terms. It is thus an equation with two sides: no copyright is too little incentive while the current regime of copyright for life+70 provides incentives whose value is exceeded by the monopoly’s costs. The most beneficial copyright term is somewhere in between those extremes, and we believe it is closer to the copyright laws enacted by our founders.
Acknowledging the costs of excessively long copyright is critical to understanding why copyright must expire – not merely because that is what the Constitution prescribes, but because it is good policy
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Even if you don't agree with the conclusions of the paper, it does provide a very succinct history of copyright in the U.S., and it's definitely worth reading for that alone.
As an interesting aside, the paper is written by Darek Khanna, who wrote a short paper previously while he was a staffer for the Republican party in the U.S. The paper was published, but Hollywood lobbyists freaked out and the paper was retracted and Khanna was canned (despite the fact that the Republican's own study committee vetted and approved the paper prior to publication).