Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Nobody is having a hard time understanding what is...we are discussing “what should be”. Currently, copyrights are wasting assets like patents. I’m arguing in favor that they should be like Trademarks with no time limit...one must merely be actively using/defending the Trademark.
Leases and mortgages are financial instruments to allow folks to leverage future payments in purchasing time limited use of a property when you don’t have he funds to buy the property outright. But the underlying property itself, the home or car, is not a wasting property.
More comparable would be the 50 years Year of Jubilee described in the Bible. Nobody owned the property, it belonged to God and was distributed to the tribes. Every 50 years, the property reverts back to the original family/tribe.
When you sold your property, you were selling the number of crops remaining until he next Jubilee when the ownership would revert back. Evidence that even real estate has be given time limits.
Since we have established that all concepts of property are in flux - what is today’s justification that copyright for fiction should be time limited when your home doesn’t just revert to society ownership after a certain number of years?
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Every wasting asset is created from nothing. Only when both parties exist and agree to terms - including time - does a wasting asset get created.
It is no different for patents and copyrights. The terms are defined for any creator to agree to - or not.
There is no perpetual property. What you think of as perpetual property is only property rights agreed to by a society, but only as long as that society exits, or thinks it should. Read history. Where are the Roman land titles? Property owned by the Confederacy? The property rights of Jews under the Nazis? The property rights under the Bolsheviks?
Property rights only exist to the extent they can be defended, whether it be via a court of law, or a gun.
The justification for term-limited copyright and patent is that those terms are the only term the current society is willing to defend.
(As to trademarks, actively using/defending makes them non-perpetual. Once the use stops, so does the trademark.)