Martin Banner wrote:
If someone creates something, physical or intellectually, shouldn't that person be entitled to some sort of financial benefit for his/her entire lifetime, regardless of how long?
Not necessarily -- physical and intellectual property are two vastly different entities and therefore need vastly different approaches in my opinion.
One house is one house and can't be duplicated, so the physical owner is able to keep control and possession or to sell it to someone else.
A song which is heard becomes two copies of that same song instantaneously. A song played for 100,000 fans becomes 100,000 copies instantaneously.
It is much harder to maintain control over that song in that case, to prevent others from performing that song, to prevent them from sharing it with others.
You would never invite 100,000 people to share your house, yet you would invite 100,000 people to share your song or your novel or your poem. You'd even invite 10,000,000 people to share your song if you could be so lucky as to get them to want to listen to your song. Thus instantaneously making 10,000,000 copies AT YOUR INVITATION. To then turn around and tell them, thanks for making all those copies in your head, but don't you dare do anything with those copies, don't hum my song, don't even think about performing it, and for goodness' sake don't you dare write it down to share with someone who can't hear the original performance, seems a bit disingenuous.
But I understand the aspect of copyright protecting that song, as the U.S. Constitution says, *for a limited time* so that you can exploit that song for full economic gain to yourself in order to encourage you to create more neat songs to make the culture richer.
But in the early days of copyright, the thought of anybody wanting to hear music from even 20 years earlier was looked on as silly -- everybody wanted the NEW stuff, not the old stuff. That was left for those few who felt they could make use of that old material.
The performing of older music has grown in the intervening centuries so that now we can economically exploit music that's 70, 80, 150 years old. That doesn't mean we should be able to.
If you invent a physical item that is brand new, you only get 28 years of protection (or is it 18 in the U.S.) through a patent. That's because technology marches on and after that period it was expected that the technology would have been creating new things, and opening the way for people to make less expensive versions of your original idea, which is good for society because then not only the wealthy can enjoy the benefits of whatever it is that you invented.
It is a two-way street. Copyright was NOT intended only to protect the creators, but to protect them some AND to enrich the public domain eventually when the copyright ran out.
It is only in recent, gimme-gimme-gimme-that's-MINE! society that copyright laws have changed to protect only the creative side of things and Public Domain can be damned, nobody cares about public culture any more. Nobody wants to share anymore -- you sing my song and I'll sue you and your children and your children's children if you haven't paid me for it! Small wonder that nations can't get along anymore, people can't get along anymore.
You create a song and I agree you should be able to exploit it for a reasonable time. But I don't find life-plus-70 to be reasonable.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
