I believe as a moral issue that people shouldn’t really own intellectual property; though I’m not convinced that our founding fathers were wrong to include limited monopolies as an incentive to get greedy bastards people that wouldn’t normally share their ideas with society to do so. So while I don’t fully agree with everything on Against Monopoly, I do agree that our current system isn’t promoting progress as well as intended. And that website is definitely worth a visit.
I’ve discussed this issue with Becky before, and she has argued that if you create something, it is yours, and you should be able to have exclusive control and profit over your creation. If someone else uses it without your permission, then it is “stealing”. Though I believe I just now realized what Techdirt means when they say this is not a zero-sum game — ideas are not taken from you when they are shared, they build on each other. If you share an idea with someone, and they share an idea with you, you both end up with more than you when you first started. Our society progresses by building on the accomplishments of those that came before us.
Copyrights (and also patents, though they’re still limited to 20 years; and while in some cases even that may be too long, that’s a different discussion) were originally designed to promote the progress of arts and sciences, not to provide an indefinite cash flow to whoever came up with (or paid for) the idea first. Even without copyrights, there are still people that would create and contribute their ideas; but copyrights should simply give those that wouldn’t normally contribute some sort of incentive to do so.
There need to be realistic limits on copyright, so that our current and future generations can build upon contemporary knowledge. The current protections we are providing are effectively preventing the sharing of some ideas indefinitely. If every single piece of art, literature, or science that is created during our lifetime never, ever reaches the public domain during our same lifetime, isn’t that effectively an unlimited copyright from our perspective? Yes, works that are created before our generation might enter the public domain, but again from our perspective, they may as well have been created hundreds of years ago.
Again, I am not convinced we should abandon copyright entirely, because the idea is to get as many people to contribute to society: those that would contribute anyway, and those that need an incentive to contribute. It is for that same reason that I am against our indefinite copyright system — we need everyone to contribute their ideas to society, and not keep it to themselves for eternity. I’m not against compensating people for their efforts; and Techdirt does a great job explaining scarce vs. infinite goods. While this post may not convince anyone to my way of thinking, hopefully I at least did a good enough job explaining why I believe the way I do.
This example is probably overused, but it is really a perfect example of sharing ideas and freedom of expression: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Simply awesome.
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