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Comment by YokoZar | Hacker News Reader

> Are you going to tell them they have no right to their own work anymore 20 years after they had one of their most successful releases?

Are you claiming they wouldn't have made the music otherwise? It's hard to imagine such megastars deciding that the marginal effort of another hit album just wasn't worth making unless they could collect hypothetical revenue for more than 2 decades.

Copyright law is to incentivize creating these works so that more stuff can get into the public domain. We've shot well past that point with excessive durations, and the public domain is suffering.

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Copyright law is to incentivize creating these works so that more stuff can get into the public domain.

You've drank too much kool-aid. Copyright law is to incentivize investments in creative works, not the creation itself. Most people that profit off of creative works have not created anything of value themselves.

According to US legal theory, the point of incentivizing investments is to increase how much money can be made by the creator, incentivizing creation.

To quote the Constitution, the purpose of copyright is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." ie To increase how much creation there is.

It doesn’t matter if they created the work 20 years ago or not, it’s theirs. Can people go into your house 20 years after you build it and just say it’s their because they like the way it looks? Intellectual property is still property.

Many people would argue that information shouldn't be classified as property. Maybe it shouldn't be completely free to reproduce and share, but thinking of it as property has obvious negative effects.

Do you propose IP be treated similarly to real property? Maybe require a permit from the government before one writes a book or song to ensure that work will be in the public interest?

Then they should pay property tax on it.

Intellectual property is not property in that way because you are not deprived of it when it is shared.

If you charged people $5 for a lifetime pass to hang out in and inspect your house, should they not be able to try to build their own version of your house 20 years later?

When you enter something into the culture, part of it leaves your control, and thats a good thing.

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