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Only 2 in 500 College Students Believe in IP
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "David Pogue of the New York Times has an interesting story about how fewer and fewer people believe that infringement is wrong. He mentions talks he gave back in 2005 where people were willing to believe that making backups of DVDs you own is wrong. Today, however, at his talks, he was only able to get two people out of a crowd of five hundred college students to say that downloading a movie or album is wrong. He goes on, like many before him, to bemoan the immorality of young people today, saying: 'I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies' problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can't even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?'"
I'd have to go look up exactly when copyright was conceptually founded (I believe someone posted in a article a couple of months ago that it has existed since the days of the Romans conceptually that puts it back into at least 1000AD or so), but it is explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. So it's been around since the late 1700's. I believe John Locke wrote about it prior to the 1780's or so. Johnson and Johnson is currently suing the American Red Cross over a trade mark registered in the 1890's. The U.S. Patent Office has been around since around the time of the founding of the United States. For instance, Abraham Lincoln was proud of the fact that he was a patent holder.
So at least two such concepts pre-date things like Women's Sufferage, or the concept that African American's shouldn't be held as Slave's in the South in the United States. Given those dates, I'm reasonable confident there is no one alive who remembers before the three concepts of Intellectual Property existed (alright, there might be a handful alive from the trademark date I quote, but I think trademarks pre-date the early 1890's, I'm just too lazy to go find out when).
So while you refer to them as "new"... You can only mean new in comparison to concepts like "bipedal humans that walk upright" or "humans forming civiliations and moving from hunter gather to agricultural modes of survival", and still be intellectually honest (or grossly uninformed on the concepts).
We have the works of Shakespeare and Newton, because they eventually fell into the public domain. Now, if you want to argue that current U.S. copyright law is just stupid, I'll back you wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, as a citizen of the U.S. and the U.S. being a signer of the Berne Convention, means that Copyright Law can't be made to be sane. It could however be lowered to limits of the Berne convention, and then at least copyright would expire in 50 years after the work was published.
Assuming that Disney isn't successful forever, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck will fall into the public domain. The entire music catalog of the Beetle's will be in the public domain in Britain within the next 20 years (they refused to increase copyright past 50 years recently). The original works of Einstien, Dirac, Godel, Turing, Plank, Hemmingway, Authur Miller, Tennesse Williams and others should eventually fall into the public domain (contemporary notable scientists and and playwrights). Hopefully within my life time (the next 40-60 years). The works will be preserved as long as it takes to get them into the public domain. The sad part is that 99% won't be. Only the things that were recognized as great works at the time will be. Who knows, maybe Shakespeare had a truely great pupil lost to the sands of time. It'd be far easier for libraries and other archivest to preserve if they didn't have to worry about copyright being an issue. It'd be easier to stand on the sholders of giants if I could use giants who were alive during my lifetime...
Kirby