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Copyright and Patent Laws Hurt the Economy
Norsefire writes "Two economists at Washington University in St. Louis are claiming that copyright and patent laws are 'killing innovation' and 'hurting [the] economy.' Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine state they would like to see copyright law abolished completely as there are other protections available to the creators of 'intellectual property' (a term they describe as 'propaganda,' and of recent origin). They are calling on Congress to grant patents only where an invention has social value, where the patent would not stifle innovation, and where the absence of a patent would damage cost-effectiveness."
While there might be a good reason to call Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the Constitution the "Copyright Clause" when talking about copyrights specifically, this clause of the constitution also authorizes patent law and perhaps other kinds of intellectual property that Congress hasn't been innovative enough to think of yet. We could call it the "Intellectual Property Clause" or the "Copyright and Patent Clause," but for my money I like "Progress Clause."
I went to ye olde library today to get copies of 2 Articles from the Journal of Applied Polymer Sciences, a Wiley Interscience Publication. Xeroxing the articles under fair use from the library was free for me.
The Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment came when I checked online to find out how much it would cost to subscribe to the journal. I thought someone misplaced a decimal point: $23,245 a year is the institutional subscription rate! That's about what I paid yearly in college tuition back when I was in college. Even worse, it's almost the value of the lab equipment I'm using in the work I've been doing on my own time.
No, I am suggesting an amount of time which would give someone a reasonable opportunity to exploit their own work however they see fit. Unlike you, I am not basing my suggestion on whether they have made "enough" money, I am basing it on the practicalities of exploiting creative work.
Apparently you regard the service of printing and distributing a book to be far more valuable than the service of actually creating the words which go into that book. You must love the phone book - it's totally free and has a huge number of excellently printed words in it.
Read Pynchon.
someone like that not receiving any royalties (even if they are dead, the royalties being left to whomever they willed it to or whatever) isn't fair.
I wonder, how many times does it have to be pointed out that the copyright clause isn't about "fair" or authors "getting their due"? It's right there in the bloody constitution. It's about being just enough enticement to encourage people to create these works in the first place so as to enrich the public domain to the maximum degree. If Emily-dang-Dickenson wrote 1800 poems without making money off but a few, then obviously the enticement was adequate.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.