Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
If you build a house....50 years later nobody comes along and says “this house now belongs to the public”.
If you sell the house and put the money in the bank. It stays your money and your kids inherit it.
If you open a restaurant...and you work in the business all your life...it doesn’t become “the public’s restaurant” when you die. You can sell the restaurant...or your kids can keep the restaurant going.
If you are a farmer....the fields don’t go to the public just because you retire from farming. You have all the crops you previously harvested...and the land is there to grow future crops that your kids farm...or they sell the farm.
If a book/story still has economic value...why shouldn’t the copyright holder continue to benefit? The public did nothing to create the work so why should they confiscate the economic value from the heirs or the owner?
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You compare apples and bananas. Yes, both are white inside, but that's pretty much the only similarity. Physical property rights have been around as long as Grok decided to stay in this cave for a while. It was his cave for as long as he could throw rocks at whomever else wanted it. People have been telling stories for just about as long, but no one ever thought that the story belonged to any individual.
Move forward a bit. Mankind started living in villages. You build your house, usually with the help of your extended family and neighbors. If someone comes to try to take your food or house, your extended family and neighbors helped you protect it. People still told stories and still no one thought that the story belonged to any individual.
Move forward some 8,000 years. People live in complex societies. Rules had been long established that your physical property was your own and people should not take it. People still told stories and still no one thought that the story belonged to any individual. Stories were written down. Rich people hired scribes to make copies of works they enjoyed. People owned libraries. And still no one thought the story belonged to the author.
Then the printing press was invented. It was a costly piece of equipment and usually only a small group of people owned one, the publishers. People still didn't think that the story belonged to the author. Rulers started to hand out monopolies to individual publisher. You and only you can print new copies of the Bible. Still no one thought that a story belonged to an individual person.
Eventually we get to England in the late 1600's. Publishers still had monopolies. The Printer's Guild was the only group allowed to print books. Authors would sell their work to a publisher. Enough influential people were writing works that people started to say that maybe the author should get a piece of that monopoly, otherwise, only the rich can afford to write. New works are a good thing. Let's assign the monopoly to the authors, not the publisher. They trotted out the story of John Milton's starving grand daughter to help sell the idea.
Eventually, in the late 1800's, a very wealthy author, Victor Hugo, got hacked off that his works were being sold outside of France and he wasn't seeing a dime of it and decided to do something about it. Thus the modern idea of super long term copyrights. The US didn't buy into this until the mid 1970's, when music and movie companies started to notice that they could make a pretty penny in the international market and gee wouldn't it be nice if we could get someone else to force people to pay us money for our music and movies.
This is the difference. Physical property rights have been around since mankind started living in groups. It's necessary for people to live together. The idea that the first person to tell a story owns that story? It's still not accepted in many parts of the world.