Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
But notice what I have been describing as property: the rights. A lease is also property - it is a thing owned. If I own the lease, the lease is my property for the term of the lease. I do not not own the land, but I do own the lease and the rights and responsibilities that come with it - even the owner of that land cannot sell those rights to someone else.
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That may be what you want to call property, but it's not generally what one considers property or own. In terms of a lease, you own nothing. You have a limited legal right to use something for a given period of time, but you don't own it. That legal right can be removed by the actual owner for various reasons, such as failure to take care of the property or failure to follow the terms of the lease. The true owner of copyright is the government. They can change the terms of the lease (copyright) at any time they choose and have done so on a number of occasions.
I think that you have fallen into the trap of taking what can be a useful analogy, i.e. one can think of copyright like it was your property because you can sell to copyright (i.e. sublease it), but it's not property because property implies a permanence that copyright and leasing does not have. At the end of a car lease, the car reverts to the true owner. At the end of the copyright, the ability to copy reverts back to it's true owner.
Leebase wants to assert that copyright should be permanent, but has so far not attempted to make a case for why it should. In the case of Disney, he asserts that Disney protects and advertises various franchises and thus the franchises ought to belong to the corporation forever.
Does this imply that when Disney declares that books about the post Return of the Jedi movie time period are no longer canon, then they should lose the copyright to those books? Does an author who does not advertise and make a book available for purchase lose the copyright?