Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
We learn and improve from history. Clearly intellectual property is real, there is real value. That's WHY certain people don't want copyright at all, or only limited.
They want free stuff. Why pay for a book....it should be free.
They want to benefit financially from someone else's work. Why write your own stories when you can make a movie based on the excellent story someone else wrote. But having made the movie, the new person wants to own the merchandizing rights to their version of the characters.
Intellectual property wouldn't have value if there weren't patents and copyrights....true. It has to be clear, though, that IP has been a hugely positive societal force.
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And you keep not answering the question, but instead moving to emotional declarations. Anyone who doesn't buy in to eternal copyright just wants free stuff. That is, of course, a red herring. Sure, some people do want free stuff, but there are plenty of people who keep pointing out what society gets out of public domain.
Intellectual property isn't real. It's simply a catch phrase, a PR ploy. What is real is that creative efforts have value to society, but a large part of that value is how other people can build on them. That's the whole point of public domain. Without PD, very little gets improved. Mobile phones would still be a novelty rather than the modern smart phone.
So how to reward creative efforts? Historically, they were paid either by patrons, performance fees or commission. Shakespeare didn't live off the royalties from his works, rather he was part of an acting company. While some of his plays were published during his lifetime, most of them weren't published until after his death. Certainly, they could have come up with a system where artists were paid a salary to produce works rather than copyright. Some countries have had systems like that. The British used a variation of their copyright system (which were assigned to printing companies rather than the actual authors of the works) to reward artists. Copyright has always been a government granted monopoly rather than true property.