On the topic of intellectual property, As a policy, there's somewhere in between "yes, forever" and "no, never" that helps society.
Ideas are unlimited, but ideas aren't the thing that's being protected by intellectual property. In the case of copyright it's the actual output of creative expression. The output of creative expression is limited. I wrote and published a book this year, The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son. Most of the ideas in the book aren't unique, but my specific work is protected. I spent a year writing it, and hundreds of dollars on editing, art, and so on. If you wanted to write a similar book, you could and I couldn't do anything about it, but the specific work I've created you can't just wholesale republish at a lower price.
We want this to an extent, because if we make the marginal price of knowledge work 0, then we will reduce the production of knowledge work. My book may or may not be something lot of people want, but if it was, then if lots of people buy it then I'll be incentivized to produce more work. If instead we say "Actually, only people who produce a tangible product can be compensated for it" then you will still get works, but only works that don't take a lot of effort or cost to produce will be made. Look at Youtube before monetization and after for examples: After creators were able to make money for their work, the quality of work went up substantially.
You might say that works will already get made, and it's self-serving to advocate for copyright after I've released a book, especially since I was presumably going to write it for my son either way.
The key here is that even if I was already going to write a book, I wasn't going to release It to the public. I wouldn't have paid an editor. I wouldn't have hired an artist. There would be no copies in the library of congress for future historians to go over. There would be no way for that work to enter the public domain, because it would sit in a box in my son's house. The policy reason for allowing intellectual property is to incentivize making works available to the public. In exchange for protection, the public gets full access to the work. Same with patents, where Instead of some production process staying a secret, the company gets an enforced Monopoly on it for a certain period of time, followed by making it available to the world for free use.
A world without copyright isn't one where we're surrounded by works like we have now. I think what you'd actually find is significantly less publicly available works, because there's no reason to perform them or make them available.
I would argue that in spite of copyright existing, we sort of see that with music. The music industry wasn't freaking out unnecessarily when they saw napster on the horizon, it is indirectly led to what is basically the abolition of copyright law for music. Although you technically aren't supposed to copy music, the reality is you can listen to any music on the planet for free, and you can probably even download an MP3. Arguably, one of the results of this has been exactly what I'm talking about, very little music worth listening to has been produced in the past 20 years, because there's just no money in it so they don't bother taking any risks. The industry is being kept alive in a state of undeath through trivial streaming royalties because the alternative is getting nothing. Music it's still being produced, but for the most part nothing like it did back when there was strong copyright that was enforceable.
I argue that this public good is balanced very poorly with the copyright holders rights under the law since 1976. For example this year is the first time ever that sound recordings will be released into the public domain. The first recovery recordings from about 1926 will be released on January 1st. In my view, It should be more like what the founders set up, a 14 year term with a 14 year extension you have to apply for. There should be a healthy and relatively recent public domain. Instead you've got companies like Disney buying all of culture for the past 120 years and acting like that's ok and normal despite everyone involved with producing what they own are often long dead.
Ideas are unlimited, but ideas aren't the thing that's being protected by intellectual property. In the case of copyright it's the actual output of creative expression. The output of creative expression is limited. I wrote and published a book this year, The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son. Most of the ideas in the book aren't unique, but my specific work is protected. I spent a year writing it, and hundreds of dollars on editing, art, and so on. If you wanted to write a similar book, you could and I couldn't do anything about it, but the specific work I've created you can't just wholesale republish at a lower price.
We want this to an extent, because if we make the marginal price of knowledge work 0, then we will reduce the production of knowledge work. My book may or may not be something lot of people want, but if it was, then if lots of people buy it then I'll be incentivized to produce more work. If instead we say "Actually, only people who produce a tangible product can be compensated for it" then you will still get works, but only works that don't take a lot of effort or cost to produce will be made. Look at Youtube before monetization and after for examples: After creators were able to make money for their work, the quality of work went up substantially.
You might say that works will already get made, and it's self-serving to advocate for copyright after I've released a book, especially since I was presumably going to write it for my son either way.
The key here is that even if I was already going to write a book, I wasn't going to release It to the public. I wouldn't have paid an editor. I wouldn't have hired an artist. There would be no copies in the library of congress for future historians to go over. There would be no way for that work to enter the public domain, because it would sit in a box in my son's house. The policy reason for allowing intellectual property is to incentivize making works available to the public. In exchange for protection, the public gets full access to the work. Same with patents, where Instead of some production process staying a secret, the company gets an enforced Monopoly on it for a certain period of time, followed by making it available to the world for free use.
A world without copyright isn't one where we're surrounded by works like we have now. I think what you'd actually find is significantly less publicly available works, because there's no reason to perform them or make them available.
I would argue that in spite of copyright existing, we sort of see that with music. The music industry wasn't freaking out unnecessarily when they saw napster on the horizon, it is indirectly led to what is basically the abolition of copyright law for music. Although you technically aren't supposed to copy music, the reality is you can listen to any music on the planet for free, and you can probably even download an MP3. Arguably, one of the results of this has been exactly what I'm talking about, very little music worth listening to has been produced in the past 20 years, because there's just no money in it so they don't bother taking any risks. The industry is being kept alive in a state of undeath through trivial streaming royalties because the alternative is getting nothing. Music it's still being produced, but for the most part nothing like it did back when there was strong copyright that was enforceable.
I argue that this public good is balanced very poorly with the copyright holders rights under the law since 1976. For example this year is the first time ever that sound recordings will be released into the public domain. The first recovery recordings from about 1926 will be released on January 1st. In my view, It should be more like what the founders set up, a 14 year term with a 14 year extension you have to apply for. There should be a healthy and relatively recent public domain. Instead you've got companies like Disney buying all of culture for the past 120 years and acting like that's ok and normal despite everyone involved with producing what they own are often long dead.
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