The NYT, that flagship of forward thinking, has published an op-ed piece calling for copyright to be made permanent. I’m linking to it half-heartedly; one side of me thinks you gotta read this thing to believe it, and the other is afraid I’ll be helping to poison minds.
A quick summary: no one has ever explained why an idea is any different from physical property. Since you don’t forfeit your land after a certain number of years, why should you have to give up “owning” a copyright?
It’s amazing how poorly people can reason. The author of the op-ed is a good example. He feels that if he can make an analogy — however strained it might be — that he has won his point.
Obviously he’s wrong. An idea is not physical property. He gives a passing nod to the founding fathers but fails to mention any part of the debate that led to the copyright/patent clause. Jefferson, for one, says that it is ridiculous to treat an idea as if it existed in the physical world. (A full quote from him is at the bottom of this post.) That’s why they settled for “limited monopoly” — because they recognized that you can only live in a fantasy world for so long.
I guess if I had to answer this guy directly — the question posed in his headline (”A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?”) — I might say:
Great ideas do not live forever. They need to evolve and have the benefit of other minds to hack at them, to improve them. Ask Walt Disney. He took the ideas in the stories of the Brothers Grimm — horrifying stories, if you’ve ever read them — and made them new, as well as palatable. Every idea has its time, and its author does deserve a short monopoly as a congratulations. Then it’s others’ turn. And in my book, that limited time is very, very short: perhaps five years, perhaps even less.
Ideas benefit from hacking. If we want to stifle creativity and innovation, we should freeze them in time with laws. If our aim is the opposite, then we should consider giving them lives of their own. You’re right: ideas live. But things can only live if you are willing to give them freedom.
…
So here’s what Thomas Jefferson had to say about this subject, in a letter to one Isaac McPherson:
“It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors … If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea.”
curious 