The Case For Perpetual Copyright

Several readers sent in a link to an op-ed in the NYTimes by novelist Mark Halprin, who lays out the argument for what amounts to perpetual copyright. He says that anything less is essentially an unfair public taking of property: "No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind." This community can surely supply a plethora of arguments for the public domain, words which don't appear in the op-ed. In a similar vein, reader benesch sends us to the BBC for a tale of aging pop performers (virtually) serenading Parliament in favor of extending copyright for recording artists in the UK. Some performers are likely to outlive the current protections, now fixed at a mere 50 years.
Update: 05/20 22:50 GMT by KD : Podcaster writes to let us know that the copyright reform community is crafting a reply over at Lawrence Lessig's wiki.

what are you wacked?

thats the stupidest fucking thing ive heard since i started at microsoft

Re:what are you wacked?

Actually, I think I get the joke!

This guy is known to write biting satire... Either that article is a fine example, or its one of the worst reasoned essays I've ever read.

Re:what are you wacked?

Satire needs to portray a specific position or attitude to be effective. This piece is just highly original rambling. No one else wants perpetual copyrights, least of all the biggest supporters of extensions of copyright, Walt Disney. What would they do if they had to start paying H. C. Andersen's family for their use of The Little Mermaid?

With perpetual copyrights, we would have perpetual heritage disputes (who owns the works of Aristotle these days?), and all important works locked away. This is just stupid.

Re:what are you wacked?

Ex post facto. The copyright wouldn't be retroactive. However: suppose, for sake of argument, that Springer-Verlag owns the copyright to Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem. Wait a hundred years, or a thousand years. Springer-Verlag is long gone, Wiles' bloodline has died out, but the company was bought by a money-grubbing organization who sells copies for thousands of (insert futuristic monetary equivalent of a dollar here). Now, the mathematical community faces a situation similar to Microsoft suing the Linux community over patents. We need to re-prove, without copying, every major mathematical result once "owned" by Springer-Verlag, if we want them to be reasonably attainable.

Perpetual copyrights are today's equivalent to burning down the Library at Alexandria.

Re:what are you wacked?

Well, look how much progress has been achieved since the Great Library was burned down.
No one was landing on the moon back then, and there was no Interweb.
Since burning the Great Library resulted in all this progress, we should immediately implement perpetual copyrights. Q.E.D.

Re:what are you wacked?

That's a retarded comment. Look how much was *lost* in the dark ages - hundreds of years of torment, torture, slavery, and having to rediscover even the most basic science.

The point is not that we landed on the moon - the point is where would we be in the astronomers of Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and India had been able to work together since the beginning.

Instead we have entire continents that went to fire and sword as one empire after another fell. With them fell their knowledge, their science, and their arts. Perpetual copyright is tanamount to having the most beautiful spouse in the world... but being unable to touch them or speak to them.

Re:what are you wacked?

"Perpetual copyright wouldn't necessarily be retroactive. They could apply only to works created after a certain date."

Yes they could, but only at the expense of giving up their claimed "moral high ground"...

Not that I think it is the moral high ground in any case...

all the best,

drew

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biOFnAlXrV8 [youtube.com]
UFO Potcake Film! Check it out!

Re:what are you wacked?

Mr. Halprin may be a brilliant novelist, or he may be a over-hyped hack, but if he gets his wish, he will also be completely forgotten in 100 years. There would be very few 11 year old faces that would light up at the words "The Little Mermaid" if Andersen's copyright hadn't lapsed. Shakespeare wouldn't be considered a one of the great writers of all time if somewhere his work hadn't escaped the bounds of being property of a few people to instead become the property of the world. The Grey Seal is not at all well known, but if it was still under copyright you wouldn't be able to buy a book by Frank L. Packard at all because no publisher would want to spend the money to pay for it. Ideas live in minds, and books eventually take more space than they are worth to booksellers. If a story doesn't become part of the culture it dies.

If you want to keep control of an idea, don't tell anyone about it. Nothing the government can do will keep people from imagining that Harry Potter had one more adventure. Eventually an idea will grow beyond control no matter how strong the copyright laws are.

Request for Payment to Mr Halprin

Dear Mr Helprin,

In light of a rumored bill before Congress to retroactively extend the limited copyright in the US to 25000 years after the death of the author (or the destruction of the last copy of the work, whichever comes last), we are investigating several potential copyright infringements in your last op-ed entitled "A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn't Its Copyright?".

Descendants of James Madison request to be compensated for any citation, partial or full, of any of his works. Descendants of Hammurabi (currently estimated at about 127 million) claim copyright on any western law text and discussion thereof, as they are all derivative works of Hammurabi's Code of Law. Finally, there have been claims by descendants of Evander, son of the Sybil, that all Roman letters fall under their copyright, and that therefore any text using them needs to pay them a fair share of proceeds.

Preliminary calculations put the projected statutory infringement fines at 4.2 trillion dollars. This number may change as more claimants come forward. As it is unknown how much more the US Congress is going to extend copyrights, we suggest to settle sooner rather than later.

Sincerely,

Howard Howe,
Dewey, Chetham & Howe, LLP

Please reprint and distribute freely. :)

Re:Cease and Desist!

There are six billion monkeys on this hunk of rock already, and most of them have access to typewriters.

If you don't want to share freely, don't do it at all. You're not a special and unique person, and you have nothing earth shattering to say that would justify participating in a system that restricts access to information and culture based on money for no justifiable reason whatsoever.

If you have so little passion for what you think and so little pride in what you create that you would prefer not to share it with the rest of us unless you are bribed to do so, then I would suggest you go get a job at MacDonalds and spend you free time on the beach working on your tan.

You're just contributing to the ever growing pile of soulless trite commercially driven crap that dulls the mind and obscures the work that has merit anyways. We won't miss you.

Re:Cease and Desist!

Why is it fair for artists to have a permanent revenue stream based on their copyrights? If copyright is extended permanently, then every year you should have to pay the architect and builders who constructed your house for their work. You should have to pay the company that built your car a fee for their work on your car. If you've ever bought anything from a fast food restaurant, you guessed it, you should have to pay.

Note too that the artist with the perpetual copyright would in fact need to pay a fee to the manufacturer of the paint he or she used. After all, the work that the paint company went through to create the paint needs to be recognized.

Re:Cease and Desist!

I think its fair to have perpetual Copy write. The work that that artist went through to create the work needs to be recognized.

It's recognised already. The artist gets paid when he sells his work to a publisher, and he gets paid again and again for 70 years' worth of royalties, even if he doesn't do any more work in his life. Why does that need extending?

If I do some work, I get paid for it once and that's that. What's so special about artistic work that means artists should get paid again and again and again for the same bit of work?

Would you deny a painter or his decedents the right to make money just because he didn't make the paint he used.

No, of course not. He has the right to sell the paintings he paints, and his descendants have the right to sell any paintings he didn't sell in his lifetime. Just as an author has a right to sell the stories he writes. Just as a builder has a right to sell the houses he builds. That's all perfectly fair.

However, I don't believe a painter's descendants have a right to demand money every time someone looks at one of his paintings, and I don't believe an author has a right to demand money every time someone reads a story he wrote. They can make money by doing work and then selling it. If they then want to make more money, they can do more work, just like everybody else has to.

I feel people have a right to make a living off their work if they so choose to do so.

And they manage to make a living just fine without perpetual copyrights, so what's the problem?

So do their children and grand children if their work goes beyond their life.

Why? What the hell gives a child the right to earn a living from his parents' work? If you want to have a living, you should have to do your own work and earn your money, not sit back and expect money to roll into your pockets because of someone else's hard work. Why should people expect to get money from work they had nothing to do with producing? What's fair about that?

Re:Cease and Desist!

Would you deny a painter or his decedents the right to make money just because he didn't make the paint he used.

I don't know, would you deny a plumber the right to make money every time you use your faucet or toilet, or would you want to pay an architect every time you opened your door to your house? How about "his" family after he's dead? Anyone can be an artist or writer and there is no certification or even skill required to produce it so why we would treat what would appear to be the least qualified people as though they were better than truly skilled and certified artisans is beyond me.

This seems akin to how our society is obsessed with completely defying natural selection by making sure we warn the idiots and retards of society that it's not wise to bring a plugged-in toaster into the shower with you; it's little more than making it easier for the idiots, whose only valuable contribution to society might be one single work of art, to live a long and comfortable enough life to breed and produce even more idiots. Real artists who want to make money should have to work, like the rest of us, to reap "repeating" benefits and their families can reap them IF the artist was wise enough to invest it for them. If they can't produce enough good art to survive then maybe they're not cut out to be an artist.

What such a thing would encourage would be our entire society to give up any education in hopes of making one single piece of art, visual or auditory, that will actually sell decently so they can live as though they are entitled to a comfortable living because of that single work, making our society even dumber than it already is. What we call an IQ of 80 would soon be our 120.
Think about how stupid the average person is and then realize that half the population is even dumber than that. --George Carlin.

Re:Kill Disney

Speaking of Disney and copyrights, I found a nice movie about copyrights made from small parts of Disney cartoons on BoingBoing, here. [boingboing.net]

they will buy the public domain

Disney and the other corporations will simply buy the public domain. What was once a public resource will be auctioned off to the highest bidder and people will have to pay. Apparently, denying everyone access to something creates economic value (if you ignore the costs to the public). Sound familiar ? I wonder how long until we will have to pay for the privilege of merely existing in a particular space. All of those roads, sidewalks, and parks could be sold off, and we could implant chips in people to debit their bank accounts to the owners of that property. You already pay rent, isn't it just an extension of the same thing ?

Not a good parallel

Space, unlike information, is limited. There is only so much living space, so many parks (and so much space in them), so many roads and so much parking space. My town actually started taxing parking, you have to buy a parking ticket to park your car on the side of the road in town.

Information always had value. But by limiting its availability, it also gets a price.

Artists Have No Right to Permanent Copyright

They *DO* have a right to paid holidays, paid weekends off, paid sick days, time-and-a-half over 45 hours weekly, free coffee, free Poland Spring Water, a dental plan, a pharmaceuticals plan, and a 401-K plan.

Don't they...?

There is no intellectual property

...except for secrets. If you tell me something, it is no longer yours. Everything protection beyond that is a deliberate incentive to create, not a right. Prolonging copyright does not provide a bigger incentive. In my opinion, copyright is already extended too long to work as an incentive: If you can milk old stuff without end, why should you create new stuff?

Re:There is no intellectual property

I agree completely. I would just add a quote I heard some time ago...

"If I have an apple and and you have an apple and we swap we will each have one apple. If I have an idea and you have an idea and we swap we now each have two ideas."

Surely this is how intellectual "property" should work.

Re:There is no intellectual property

If my idea is the only thing I have, and I give it away, I don't eat. That's "so what".

I don't know the best solution to this situation. Clearly we want to reward people to create patterns for a living: writers, musicians, filmmakers. Just as clearly, doing so using the same mechanisms as physical property is no longer workable. (It was, at one point in the past: an author traded his book to a publisher for money, who then had the exclusive license to print physical copies. That no longer holds in a world where such things are sold electronically.)

Like I said, I don't have any solutions. I do know that I find the attitude that "if I can copy it I should be able to" (which I see a fair bit of on Slashdot) rather self-serving: people are taking their newfound ability to copy music, movies, etc. and objecting to any attempt to limit it as if they were entirely entitled to it. The sellers are still working under an old paradigm, and it's unfair to tell them that they're the losers until somebody manages to come up with a new paradigm.

I'd be less upset if Slashdotters showed any interest in coming up with that new paradigm. Instead, the attitude seems to be, "Hey, free music/movies/etc!". Tremendous effort is put into breaking any new copy protection (which, I concur, will be ultimately futile) and none into suggesting a new business model.

(Well, there's the ever popular "musicians should play more concerts" model. If I ever meet such a person in person, I shall ask them if they've ever tried to play concerts professionally, and if they haven't I shall spit in their faces.)

Re:There is no intellectual property

I don't think he claimed that ideas have no economic value, just that the economics of ideas is fundamentally different from the economics of "stuff." Pretending that they are inherently the same or should be treated as such is insane. Personally, I support the idea of a limited copyright term simply to make the creative expression of ideas a profitable enterprise. However, I strongly oppose the suggestion that a creator has an exclusive right to profit from his creation for the rest of his life.

In my opinion, when you create something and share it, you've given up your exclusive right to it. It "belongs" to society, simply because locking it up requires an unnatural effort to prevent an idea (or information) from being expressed. That's why physical property and intellectual property are just naturally different things. As I said, I'm willing to tolerate an artificial "lending" of that property back to its creator long enough to create an economic incentive to create, but the laws as they stand now are ridiculously imbalanced.

Re:There is no intellectual property

A rather lengthy quote from Jefferson that I think sums up what people on this thread are saying: "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 everyone, 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 at 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."

Don't forget his other flaw.

WHAT if, after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during your life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the government would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society ... to houses. Or to businesses. Were you to have ushered through the many gates of taxation a flour mill, travel agency or newspaper, they would not suffer total confiscation.

Go ahead and skip paying the property taxes (unless you're a church) and see how long it takes the government to take those away.

If you want to treat "intellectual property" the same as physical property, then let's start with taxing it. Even if it doesn't make a profit for you. If you've released it, it goes into Public Domain unless you keep paying the taxes on it.

I actually believe that this would be the best "middle ground" between the the two sides. 99.999% of the stuff published would NOT be valuable enough to keep paying taxes on, year after year after year. Say $5 per item (single song, single story, single program, etc).

The items that ARE that valuable are so valuable that the owners (not necessarily the original producers of the work) can BUY legislation that extends copyright indefinitely for EVERYTHING. Even the 99.999% of stuff that isn't worth it.

I wonder...

Is this one of the ways a culture can commit suicide?

Re:I wonder...

I think it's more than just a culture committing suicide; perhaps all of humanity is trying to destroy its own free will in favor of a strict rulebook governing what happens and when.

Unlike physical property, "intellectual property" actually infringes upon others' right to think.

Imagine the future. It is clear that some day, maybe soon or maybe distant, we will know how to interface computers directly with the mind. We will quite literally expand our own minds. What is the difference between a book stored in your digital memory and a book stored in someone's birth-given photographic memory? What is the difference between DRM in a computer and DRM in a mind? How can you have preemptive systems that stop the transfer of information without affecting the computers connected to our brains? This is, literally, the path to third-party mind control.

Are we going to have "intellectual" laws that make it illegal to remember something for too long, or too precisely? Will we have laws that make it illegal to communicate something you know? Because, at its base, this is what intellectual property is. It will become more and more evident as humans gain physical control over their own minds.

So much insanity in that article I don't know wher

So much insanity in that article I don't know where to start, but lets try:

"Freeing" a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, "The Garden Party," while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

Has this guy heard of the internet? Where anyone can 'publish' for almost no cost.

Re:So much insanity in that article I don't know w

Not to mention the virtual impossibility of tracking whose property is in whose in perpetuity. Can you imagine the maker of the chair owning the "intellectual property" for chairs forever? Imagine the legal minefield absolutely everything would become if the estate of the guy who made the first chair started suing eachother. Imagine how ingenuity would grind to a halt as everything become wrapped up in the barbed wire of protection.

This is why I'm in favour of the public domain, and in favour of it sooner rather than later. When your idea, or you implementation, or your song, or your algorithm, or your sheet music go into the public domain, it fosters innovation. The short-term monopoly you are given fosters the actual creation, but when it enters the public domain the real innovation hits. Look, for instance, how hiphop artists are sampling old public domain records. Look at code that's free to be changed. The examples are endless.

But at the end of the day the real challenge is not people extending copyright and treating patents like warheads and trademarking the "Apple". The real challenge is, instead, educating the masses why what you create isn't yours naturally. It's ours. It's the way it's always been: what humanity creates belongs to humanity. You can try to stop it, of course. But you'll fail.

Re:People should be paid but....

"Basically, when a an artist creates a song for example, copyright gives them a limited time to commercially exploit their material."

No, they still have unlimited time to 'commercially exploit their material'. The limit is only on the time that the ability is solely theirs.

When the copyright expires on Madonna's stupid Bananas song, she doesn't lose the ability to make money from it. She can still sing in it concerts, sell CDs/MP3s/whatever, and anything else she wants. Others will be able to sell CDs/MP3s of it, but they will still be completely unable to BE her and sing it live in concert.

And for her to stop making money on the CDs requires the assumption that nobody will pay for the official CD. Collectors, fans, and others who simply enjoy the music will continue to buy the original to support the artist.

What removing lengthy copyrights DOES do it remove the bullshit from the system. No more price-gouging for CDs. They can't pay the artist $.07 a song and sell them for $1.30 anymore. They'll have to actually have reasonable rates because someone else WILL sell it for a reasonable rate.

(My apologies to those of you who actually like the Bananas song. All 3 of you.)

Copyright is Public Protection

In exchange for you making your creations public. Society has to benefit, but it was also recognized that without copyright there would be less incentive to work on certain things.

So society promised authors/creators/artist a limited time monopoly as incentive and society gets the benefit of the artwork/creation and later having it in public domain.

Don't forget, having copyright in the first place causes a strain on society. IP is not a natural right. Copyright is a mutually beneficial contract between creators and society. The article's author wants to subvert the contract completely in the favor of one side. In U.S. contract law, for contracts to be valid, both sides have to have had a clear benefit for the contract to be considered valid.

Copyright already has been subverted to the one side so often (copyright extensions) without any clear benefits given for the other side, I would have to start arguing that the contract is not valid anymore. I don't believe anybody is owed rights that place an undue burden on society unless society also benefits in some way. This is not the case here.

If you want your thing protected forever, lock it in a vault, don't let it see the light of day, and don't tell anybody about it. Let it die, along with you eventually.

Re:Copyright is Public Protection

Mod the parent up.

What everyone is forgetting is that society agrees to enforce copyright but it has costs. I agree to let you and only you sell your work (without taking it, just copying it or doing whatever I would wish with it) because then you have an incentive but there is no reason for me to spend lots of resources to ensure that you keep all the gain if there is no give back.

The cost on enforcing copyright is paid for by society with the idea that it gains. If there is no gain, why spend enormous resources protecting copyright?

Copyright is not some inherent right and I keep thinking everyone keeps forgetting this.

Strange

Strange, in his article Helprin doesn't mention anything about HIM paying royalties to Shakespeare's descendants for his use of the title Winter's Tale [wikipedia.org] for his novel (it is the name of, and a reference to a Shakespeare play). Presumably he should cough up something for the use of a similar plot device too.

No mention either of what he should be paying the descendants of every innovator in printing technology.