Re: "Against Intellectual Property"

On Thu, 03 Aug 2000, Linda Gruber <linda[_at_]novelart.com> wrote:
>
> Maybe you don't own a car, or maybe you don't drive...

[Long imaginary parallel removed]

This parallel doesn't work is because a copyright is not a material object, which have the nasty feature that if you give, sell or lend it, you yourself no longer can use it. When you copy a novel, or whatever piece of information, you still have full use of your original. Because of these very different physical characteristics, different laws are required.

Goverments never took away private property rights, they created them (with some limitations) in the first place, as a means to regulate a reasonable peaceful and prosperous society. Without government, there are no property rights at all, but only the law of the jungle.

Likewise, goverments created copyrights -- which are monopolies, not properties -- and by my opinion have cone overboard in extending them too much, while at the same time haven't done much to stop the confusion of abstract and concrete objects.

I think copyright law is currently at a stage that very few people accept them, and live by them (unlike property of real objects), given the millions of people who happily used napster, but wouldn't think about stealing the physical objects from the record shop. Any law that is not carried by a large part of the people is unworkable and undemocratic. I really think copyright has reached that stage.

Of course, we will need some way to renumerate the very valuable work of authors, etc., as otherwise society will be deprived of these works, and copyright may be a good way to do that, but, I think a term of say 25 years would be well enough to cover 99% of the economic returns of 99% of the works, and probably provide more than enough incentive for all works produced. If a work cannot earn back its initial investment within that term, probably few investors will be interested anyway. (Please name me some outside government investments in infrastructure).

The longer copyright terms in my opinion only serve those very few authors (actually heirs of authors) of very succesful works, and to keep the market free from a lot of competition from PD works, such as Dover publishes.

Of course, most authors actually do not write for economic renumeration alone, and also have a more or less personal attachment to their works -- that's why copyright law outside the US also knows so called "moral rights" -- In my opinion "personality rights" would be a better name --, which, in my opinion may last much longer, although even for these life+70 is too much -- but which can also be separated from the economic rights.

If you like the property parallel though, I am very much in favour of an abandonment clause in copyright, as there exists for real estate. If you don't use it for say ten or thirty years, you lose it.

Jeroen Hellingman
<jehe[_at_]kabelfoon.nl> Received on Sat Aug 05 2000 - 08:15:16 GMT