[Iphinome]

Originally Posted by kennyc

The copyright and patent laws were put in place to protect creators and to encourage creative endeavors, not for the public other than the side-effect of that creation being made more readily available to the public due to the protection offered the creator by the law. To argue anything else is foolish and a misunderstanding of the purpose of intellectual property laws.

The copyright and patent laws were put in place to break the monopoly that printers guilds had over individual books. Authors sold the rights to printers who then kept them forever. The laws opened things up for the public. To argue that this didn't create the public domain in the first place is foolish. It is not a side effect, it was the purpose. That was in 1709.

Later in the 1790s James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had a little debate about it. They wanted to encourage more works but Jefferson opposed monopolies then later considered a short one would bring the best balance of creating new works and allowing other people to build on what came before. The freedom to expand on what was there was the main concern.

you can find quotes from the letters that passed between the two here http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=1999&post=1999-02-11$2

The saying
there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements
to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a
monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the
benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to
be opposed to that of their general suppression.

Also of note is this letter written by Jefferson on August 13, 1813

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/wr...rf/jefl220.htm

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until wecopied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

I have sources from the people who got together and made the laws. I don't think the argument is at all foolish.