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Originally Posted by petrucci
This is true. However, I believe that it is fairly convincing. Quite simply you cannot have capitalism if people can steal things that they want. Copyright is the legal basis to prosecute such theft.
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No. Copyright creates intellectual property. Without copyright, there can be no intellectual property, and therefore, without copyright there is no theft. The public domain is not theft. Copyright is property in the sense that it can be bought and sold. That it doesn't last forever doesn't make it theft. It's quite different than physical property, because with physical property, because even without government, you have power to protect your property, you can lock your door, for example. Property law merely provides additional support for the power you already have. It's different with intellectual property, because without government, you have no means to protect what you have created.
If we can't have capitalism without eternal copyright, or at least copyright terms that are longer today, and copyrights were significantly shorter in the past, it logically follows that capitalism has never existed. When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, copyright was only 14 years, with an option to extend an additional 14 years.
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I already have. I stated that in many instances the value of works is not immediately recognized. Thus long periods of copyright are important.
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False. It's extremely rare for a book to only have it's value recognized after many years. Has there EVER been a book that only had it's value recognized 70 years after the death of the author?
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I also argued that if works that have value are freely available (not copyright), they compete with the sales of newly created works. This is detrimental to the creation of new works. Thus, I believe that works that have value should be in copyright.
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A hack author, blaming lack of sales on the public domain might argue that. Write better books, and people will buy them. Putting Jane Austen back under copyright wouldn't result in more people buying new books. English teachers would love it if their students were flocking to public domain classics, but they aren't.