On 07/12/09 12:07, somebody wrote:
> Why?

	It's a fundamental difference I have. I don't believe in equating 
intangibles with property. I do believe in copyright, as an entity 
recognized and enforced by the government which gives the owner certain 
rights.

	And I believe in it for only one reason: Providing certain protections 
will promote the production of art and enrich (in a non-materialistic 
manner) the society and culture. I have no other reason to believe in 
it. Were it not for this, I'd move to abolish it.

	In particular, I do *not* believe that it is an individual right to 
have copyright (in the sense of universal human rights). The main idea 
is to benefit society, and not the individual. Copyright merely gives 
the individuals some privileges to further that goal. In the bigger 
picture, the individuals don't factor in.

	Taken straight from the US Constitution (or so some web site claims):

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for 
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their 
respective Writings and Discoveries".

	The stated goal is to progress science and the arts. Not to provide 
some arbitrary rights to people.

	To get to my point, when the copyright period is too long, then the 
incentive to promote the arts is greatly reduced. If you have lifetime 
copyright, then the person who produced a piece of art has a lot less 
incentive to produce more pieces of art.

	Take Star Trek. It almost disappeared. The series were all dead, and no 
movie had been made for what, 8 years? If they hadn't resurrected it, it 
would have vanished, despite there being a continual demand for Star 
Trek related material.

	On the flip side, a product (like Star Trek and James Bond) will be 
milked to ridiculous extremes, resulting in little incentives for proper 
innovation.

	Copyright hurts by protecting both possibilities.

 > What's the difference between someone toiling for decades to build a
> house and leaving it for their kids to benefit by renting it, and someone
> toiling for decades to build art and leaving it for their kids to benefit by

	The difference is that ownership of physical property is considered 
more or less a human right. Few disagree - not even communists really 
disagree with that. Intellectual property is not generally agreed upon 
to be a human right.

	In other words, the burden is on you to explain why they should be 
allowed to benefit from it. Specifically, why do you even think there 
should be copyright?

	Note that I'm not saying that individual works of art can't be owned 
and passed on after 20 years. Whoever owns the Mona Lisa still owns it, 
and it is still valuable. Copyright, though, is about copying and not 
ownership.

> licensing it? I would suggest that copyright should be perpetual, rather
> than an arbitrary number of years. Worth diminishes naturally anyway, be it
> of material or immaterial things, but that should come naturally, not
> through decree that the commercial worth of an artist's life work becomes
> zero at his deathbed, or after an arbitrary number of years since creation.

	You say "naturally". There's nothing natural about copyright. It's a 
contrived and relatively recent concept.

-- 
Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright 
ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little 
sign of breaking down in the near future.

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