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Isn't there a difference between physical and intellectual property? Isn't that why patent and copyright laws are different than laws regulating the ownership of physical things?
I think it is utterly wrong to claim that the public did nothing to create a work of art. Quite to the contrary, the work of art exists in a continuum of ideas, could never exist without the art that came before it; it all is a giant web of influence, reaction, borrowing, appropriation. It is what keeps culture going. Imagine not being able to build upon the work of Shakespeare because of copyright? If there was a Shakespeare Inc. that worked like Disney, a play like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead could never have been written, because Stoppard would have had to licence the use of the characters. Would all those films based on Shakespeare's plays or Jane Austen's or Charles Dickens's novels been made if those works weren't in the public domain?
And how many ideas from the 20th century lie dead in libraries in books that the copyright holders don't reprint because it wouldn't be economically viable, but which still can't be uploaded to places like MR for free, because they are still in copyright?
And if you demand eternal copyright, you must also demand eternal patents. Now try to buy a car, if the manufacturer had to pay licence fees to the heirs of every inventor back to the laddie or lassie who invented the wheel? Do you think you could afford one then?
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