Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Ok, I tell you this. At the death of anybody, all of their assets are dissolved and given to the government. No? Why not? Yes? You b@stard 
Why should the work of an artist be given to public domain and not the work of an investment banker or ship builder, cattleman or land baron. |
Because the work of an artist is not property any more than programs that I write are my property. You can call them "intellectual property" but that doesn't make them property.
The whole copyright as property is a very new concept, one that was not recognized for the some 2500 years that we have had literary works. Physical property laws have been recognized for just as long.
The Library of Alexandria was build by scribes making copies (and giving the copies back rather than the original) of every scroll they could get their hands on.
It takes a little more than a simple assertion to over come all that history. There are very good reasons that literary works have not been treated as property through all of history, yet buildings and money have. It's basically impossible to prevent someone from making a copy of a book. It's impossible to keep story tellers from telling stories that they hear. Through most of history, the very idea that one would want to do these things would have been considered madness. The shared stories are what binds a society together.