Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
The public benefits most when people are incentivized to create works. Works the public then pays for. Because works are paid for, more incentive to create works.
When the public seizes property...there is no incentive to create.
Sure, very few works are valuable....but those are the works people want. People want Mickey Mouse and Star Wars and Harry Potter. They want them because they are valuable.
The original story of Snow White is not why people want to have access to Disney's Snow White. You can ALREADY write new Snow White stories based on the original. But what is valuable is Disney's Snow White and the 7 dwarves with explicit names and the look of Disney's drawings. Why? Because of the business Disney built making the brand, the characters, the story valuable. People spend thousands of dollars to go to Disney theme parks so the kids can meet the characters that the movies and tv shows and cartoons have built up demand.
So of COURSE, people would love to have free access to the value the Disney Corp has spent decades and billions of dollars building up. They want to sell Mickey Mouse hats, and Halloween costumes, etc.
All of this economic good....blessing children generation after generation...providing jobs and powering innovation....
All of this because of the concept of intellectual property.
And like real property...it’s value does not belong to the public.
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Where this argument falls apart is that through out most of history, copyright did not exist, yet stories were still told and books were still written.
The second fallacy of the argument that infinite copyright is necessary for a writer to want to write a book is that until 1975, copyright in the US was 28 years plus a 28 year renewal. The lack of infinite copyright doesn't seem to have stopped anyone from writing books prior to 1975. When Walt Disney created the cartoon character Mickey Mouse in 1928, he wasn't expecting it to still be generating revenue 100 years later. Expanding the copyright past 28+28 didn't happen until well after he died in 1966.
Of course the whole idea of wealth being past down from generation to generation as you describe rarely works out that way mostly because very few works retain value for long. Old authors are replaced with new authors who re-imagine old stories for new audiences. All one has to do is read stories from one's youth and see how dated they feel to understand this.
You take the exceptions and act like they are the norm. What's more, you take the current state and project it back. Does anyone think that Tolkien wrote LOTR with the expectation that it would bring in hundreds of millions of dollars long after his death? Unlikely, writing was a sideline to his main academic job. Tolkien was already in his 60's when LOTR was published. His earlier work, the Hobbit was very well received and won awards as a children's book when published in 1937, but he certainly didn't quit his day job because of that.