"The Congress shall have power ... to promote the progress of science and useful arts ... by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries."
While I believe our founding fathers were wrong -- that intellectual property rights do not and cannot easily be made to serve the purpose for which they were intended -- it still should be clear that the intent was to grant a brief advantage to inventors and authors, that specific public purposes had to be served by intellectual property laws, and finally that property is a misnomer. Intellectual property is owned by the public and in essence leased to authors and inventors. A temporary economic advantage for authors and inventors is created because a hopefully more valuable benefit will accrue to the public, and ultimately the lease expires and all rights return to the general public.
Economic advantage, while not inherently evil and certainly a part of the engine of commerce, is a reward to authors and inventors for contributing to "the progress of science and the useful arts." Economic advantage is not in and of itself a valid purpose or justification for copyright or patent laws. So how is science and the useful arts advanced by a massive act of public theft advanced by the entertainment industry to secure Mickey Mouse, and secured by Congress?
Presuming that there still is a useful purpose served by patents and copyrights, any economic advantage accrues very quickly today. Creative works incur over 90 percent of their economic reward within almost a few years of their release, often less. Why are we working so hard to nearly infinitely increase the duration? Intellectual property is supposed to return to the public domain.
Metallica and Disney may care about how much they collect when someone downloads their works, but I suspect that John Lennon and Janis Joplin are "happy" that a new generation is listening to their music, and I doubt that they are looking to spend any royalty checks.
I have my own moral issues with some of what goes on with p-to-p, but I am not in a great hurry to commit our national resources to protecting thieves from theft.
Thanks, David. I couldn't have said it better.
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