The term "intellectual property" is a misnomer. You do not own your ideas. What people refer to as "intellectual property" is a monopoly on the commercial exploitation of an idea. The government grants you this monopoly as a reward/incentive for coming up with the idea. This is fine, as long as you still allow fair use, and you still have new material entering the public domain on a regular basis.
The fact that works eventually pass into the public domain is a feature, not a bug. One of the reasons we as a society have chosen to reward new ideas is so that they will pass into the public domain, where they can be used as inspiration for still more new ideas (i.e., "derivative works").
Slashdot Mirror
The term "intellectual property" is a misnomer. You do not own your ideas. What people refer to as "intellectual property" is a monopoly on the commercial exploitation of an idea. The government grants you this monopoly as a reward/incentive for coming up with the idea. This is fine, as long as you still allow fair use, and you still have new material entering the public domain on a regular basis.
The fact that works eventually pass into the public domain is a feature, not a bug. One of the reasons we as a society have chosen to reward new ideas is so that they will pass into the public domain, where they can be used as inspiration for still more new ideas (i.e., "derivative works").