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.

Comments

Rubbish

[ZwJGR]

That article reads like a cross between the bible and a badly written lawyer's speech.

Does this fool really think that anybody should be given right to own an idea, a sequence of letters, etc. for eternity... The idea that you can pass on the rights to make profit from the mere existence an idea you thought up to your grandchildren is laughable.

The problem is:
Author writes book.
Author becomes fabulously rich.
Author has child.
Author dies.
Descendant makes money off of parent's book, by doing zilch and being a drain on society.
Rake in cash, reproduce and repeat...

If you haven't made enough money off your IP in 50 years, it can't have been all that good can it.

Furthermore, one should not envy the perpetrators of sensationalist trash, but rather admire them Are you an idiot?

American citizens, get it into your excuses for brains.
Money Isn't Everything.

There is more to life than the $dollar$.
You can only buy so much, for not doing very much...
Society as a whole benefits from a balanced distribution of resources, with mutually beneficial input from all sides.