This is an exchange between my brother and myself. My brother is a bit of a libertarian Republican who doesn't feel that the extension of the copyright laws are a big deal. His response to the report I just posted is below, followed by my response to him. If anyone has any ideas on how to sharpen or extend my argument (or can point out flaws/weaknesses), I'd appreciate it. Also, why the hell didn't we know about this earlier? We should have been protesting this. Who's watching the criminals in Washington? Bill ------- start of forwarded message ------- On Fri, October 30, 1998 at 08:31:34 (-0600) Jim Lear writes: >I don't like the way this was passed (just like most laws, lots of secrecy), >but I'm not sure what the arguments are against extending the copyright >laws. Mickey's a extremely valuable asset for Disney. Who would gain if it >were public domain? Yeah, we might get to see some great new films that we >otherwise wouldn't have, such as *Beevis, Butthead, and Mickey Mouse do each >other*, but I'm not sure who the loser is in this. I suspect the reason it >may have been so quietly done is there may be little opposition to it. It's not about Mickey, per se. I could care less whether Mickey Mouse lives or dies. It's about corporate control over goods which, according to the Constitution, should be turned over to the public domain after a "limited" period. The loser is the public, because goods which should have been free will now not be. Books, music, all sorts of cultural artifacts, will now be "free" to be sold to those who can afford to purchase them, rather than, after a "limited" interlude, given back to enrich the public domain. The whole point of copyright protection was to provide impetus to *new* inventions and to therefore provide for a possibility of a stream of income from them for a limited time. Whether or not the goods are "valuable" to Disney today is irrelevant. In fact, the Constitution (Art 1, Sec. 8) is clear on this: to secure "for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries", not "for as long as the writings and discoveries shall be valuable" --- in fact, to do what you suggest would be absurd, for when then would they be turned over to the public domain? When they *lacked* value, when they were worthless. I happen to agree with the approach taken by the Constitution: "limited times" should be *limited* (I think strictly so), not extended ad-hoc when some giant corporation discovers that it has a set of goods that would "go public". Suppose they said, ok, 250 years. You know what would happen? Adam Smith's *Wealth of Nations* would be purchased by someone, probably a huge company, and copies of it available on the Internet would be removed under threat of lawsuit. This would represent a loss, an "enclosure" of public space by private interests, to be sold to the highest bidders among the public, not distributed widely, a true devaluation of the wealth of nations. And the reason there is little opposition is that the media declined to cover it, though they surely knew about it. Media (content providers) have little interest in public goods. If they had had the public interest in mind, they would have covered this from the beginning... Bill ------- end of forwarded message -------
