So the wife that supported the author can't profit off their assets? The author can't pass on this to children? Should we do the same thing for other property like land and money?
They certainly can. Certain assets are depreciating with time though, like copyrightable works. They only have value because of the law in the first place, and the law sets the timeline for that value to depreciate to zero.
Perhaps supporting a writer shouldn't be a career/investment opportunity though.
>Should we do the same thing for other property like land and money?
Like, with taxes on inheritance? We should and we do. And arguably, we don't do it enough.
The question is: are the authors that much better off from the way the laws are now? Is the society overall? If we tell the authors that, in fact, their grandchildren won't be able to profit off of their books, what kind of literature shall we lose?
We already have the answer, since the draconian copyright laws are pretty recent. Great works of literature have been written before such laws existed, and introduction of these laws hardly improved writing overall (or the plight of the author, for that matter).
Authors that get paid can certainly leave the assets they received to their families. They could also transfer ownership of unpublished intangible assets. More than that sucks the general public into a quasi-contractual relationship with a posthumous person; I disclaim fiscal obligations of strangers toward ghosts.
and copyright doesnt prevent you from writing a story about a boy wizard attending a school and fighting against a evil big bad. Nor does it prevent you from writing a story about a rag tag group of rebels fighting against an empire.
Copyright puts a chilling effect on making anything resembling the original work, so long as the plaintiff (usually a large corp or hedge fund) has a better team of lawyers than the defendant (new writer)
Easy. The ownership of intellectual property can indefinitely remain with the author (or be passed on to their children, spouses, etc).
We even have a great model for it now: NFTs.
The right to copy that work, however, isn't something that was either created or owned by the author. That exclusivity is a privilege granted by the state, introduced because it was believed to benefit the society overall.
You can inherit a car, but not a driver's license. The argument is that the exclusive license to copy a work of art is really more like the latter.
Sure! There is a natural right to own things: I have a thing, I am not giving it to you. I am the authority. If you want to have it, well, you'll have to do something. Because you can't drive my car while I'm driving it.
That was the problem that the communists ultimately couldn't resolve: people end up having things no matter what you do. My, mine are one of the first words humans learn to utter.
"Intellectual property theft" is a misnomer; like "identity theft".
>The value in intellectual property is the right to copy it.
You are almost correct.
It's not the right to copy. It's the exclusivity, enforced by the state. By definition, it's a privilege (not a right), and is created by punishment.
Information has no inherent value once it becomes public knowledge. The state needs to be actively involved for public information to have any value.
So, we're not talking about the right to copy that gets passed along. Nobody is talking about taking that right away.
It's the privilege to command the state to punish someone for making a copy without one's permission that we say shouldn't be passed along to one's heirs.
If I have an idea and you have an idea and we exchange ideas, both of us end up with two ideas each.
There may be labour in both but there's a fundamental difference between physical property and intellectual property.
How would that work? Given that one exposed to an idea, a person cannot exactly erase it from their mind...
I mean if I have an idea and I give it to you the idea itself is still in my mind. And in order to give it to you I have to communicate it to you, so now it is in your mind too. So innately, while physical objects are physically moved, ideas are only ever copied; the former creates a sense of ownership because when a brick is in your hand it is not in mine, whereas the latter makes this notion of ownership impossible.
Let's try anyway. If I write the idea on a piece of paper, zip it into an envelope, and give the envelope to you, not only do I still have the idea in my head but can you really claim to somehow "have" the idea too? Unless you open the envelope and you don't get to actually "have" it, you have an envelope which contains a copy of the idea that's still in my mind and not in yours. You don't even know what I've given you unless I shared the idea with you beforehand, at which point we're back to square one and the piece of paper is moot (it may carry more detail but that's immaterial to the concept of ideas fundamentally being only copied).
A person has an idea and writes it on a piece of paper, puts it in an envelope, gives it to me, the person dies, I don't ever open the envelope and then I give it to you. Did I ever "own" the idea? I don't even know what it is? A copy of the idea has disappeared when the person died, the piece of paper has a copy on it, and once you read it that idea will be in both in your mind and the paper until you burn the latter.
So maybe you're thinking, but the person of origin of the idea matters. Okay, let's go along with it. Say you and I never even remotely interacted, and I come up with a "foobarbaz" idea and you come up with a "foobarbaz" idea, and we happen to meet. We exchange ideas and realise "oh we had the same idea!"; how can the idea be "the same" if it has been independently conceived and the person of origin matters? To double down on that, after the transactional exchange, we both have one "foobarbaz" idea , not two identical ones each: the operation was a complete noop.
We could drill down further about whether any idea can ever be truly original or if it's about standing in the shoulders of giants, so a huge proportion of any idea or the process having led to is is actually not original at all but instead remixes.
All this to essentially say that "ownership of ideas" and "usage rights" are really a completely artificial construct, one that aims to replicate ownership as it is born out of physical reality.
Which brings me to TFA's situation, in which half a million books are essentially disappeared purely for the sake of pretending ideas are like bricks, as in they should be "owned" because someone could make money off of it, which is not even true because even if I wanted to throw a truckload of money at these folks they would still not allow the ideas to be accessed because they can't be bothered to republish - even though they can be bothered to sue - so the paper/bits might just as well be set on fire, which is most certainly not what the authors would have desired.
PS: Obviously authors deserve tools that help them make a living and combat plagiarism, but this situation is way beyond that and highlights how these artificial constructs are completely upended to the detriment of all.
Just step back and think about how irrational this is. Abstract constructs like this are arbitrary.
Yes, it's arbitrary - just like practically everything else. Having to drive my car on a road and not kill anyone is arbitrary, but leads to good outcomes.
You're free to give away your work. Stop telling others what to do with their work and that you want to take it because they died.
And an appeal to putting all your eggs in one basket and then demanding that eggs remain valuable long after you're dead and replicators are invented.
Also, why does your family get to shirk their obligation to contribute to society?
What about the families of people who toil over creative work and don't hit the jackpot? There are many fine writers/artists who never gain more than a niche audience while garbage sells big. Go to a bookstore and look at the history section, pseudo-historians like Bill O'Reilly are given more shelf space than serious historians. To be frank I almost exclusively buy from used book stores for the last decade because nonfiction offerings in chain/non-specialist bookstores are so bad. Vendors of used books tend to select for quality rather than popularity.
> Stop telling others what to do with their work
We are not telling them what to do we are saying authors shouldn't have the right to restrict what we can do, or to be more precise, say - because that's what copyright is in the end, a limitation on free speech.
FWIW, this is also why we have copyright. In fact, this is explicitly why we allow copyright in US.
The founders of the US intended copyright to last for 14 years, with the ability to renew for a single extra 14-year extension. Like patents, copyright was intended to expire quickly in order to serve the good of the public. Thank Disney for fucking that up for everyone. You have refuted your own argument.
But specifically a lot of us have an issue with the fact that beginning in the 20th century, copyright durations have been increasing so quickly that it's starting to look more like copyright is becoming permanent.
The founders were well aware of the negative societal effects of monopoly. We are well aware of them and suffering under several forms of monopoly today, many of which are enforced through copyright. The founders chose to grant a LIMITED and TEMPORARY monopoly to copyright holders, not an UNLIMITED and PERMANENT one, because of this. The eminently reasonable and middle of the road position is that we should reduce the duration of copyright, restoring it to its original intent. This corrects one of the general class of pro-monopoly errors we have made which have increased wealth inequality and damaged our society.
It is truly extraordinary how much damage Disney has done (with government as a willing collaborator) against the original intent of the founders and the will of the people.
Nor encorugae assassinations by having stuff go public domain immediately upon death.
We have copyright "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"
If our current implementation is not an optimal way to achieve this goal, then it needs to be re-evaluated.
The terms is too long as is, but I see no reason to not have any posthumous transfer period so the family can figure out what they want to do with their knowledge.
If you don't want to share your knowledge, the solution is simple.
Once you've put it out there, it becomes a tiny piece of human culture that can be referenced and discussed, and ultimately reproduced.
Just because an artist releases a work to the world, doesn't mean they have any natural rights to own what the culture does with it.
Whats the difference here? Have idea, share some of it, monetize it from peope who want to use it, later on it's a free for all or enough knowledge comes to easily reverse engineer it anyway.
^Just because an artist releases a work to the world, doesn't mean they have any natural rights to own what the culture does with it.
No natural right, no. But humans are greedy, tragedy of the commons, etc. So governments made copyright to protect those artists.
It's been, as usual, perverted by the people who least need that protection, but the idea is still sound. In a world of greed, give the creators time to be greedy so they can make a living off their own work. Then later on its a free for all.