There are those who think that copyright protection should be for a very limited time. Those folks tend to belong to the “information wants to be free” gang that has proliferated since the dawn of the Internet and the ubiquity of the World Wide Web.
Recently, Thomas Umstattd posted a video under the title Why Copyrights Hurt Authors. He asserts that “When our founding fathers created the copyright they did it to encourage the spread of ideas.”
Sort of true. The Consitution, in Article 1, Section 8, states that congress has the authority “to promote the progress of science, and the useful arts, by securing, for limited times, to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
Clearly, this is primarily intended to protect the intellectual property of its creators more than to ensure that everybody else can capitalize on it.
I will admit that the current statutory extension of copyright protection to the author’s life plus 70 years is probably excessive. I do think that, as a minimum, it should be for the author’s life (however long that might be).
If I take the time to create an original creative work — whether written or in some other form, I should have the right to determine the limitations on its use for as long as I live. It is, after all, MY work.
That in no way restricts legitimate scholarly use of the work nor does it prevent anyone else from using that work as a springboard for their own original creative work. As long as they don’t copy it or create a derivative work from it — as defined legally — or try to stretch the limits of fair use beyond the mostly reasonable limits imposed on such use by legal precedents, I see no real problem.
I have created a lot of historical works — the books Cessna Warbirds, T-41 Mescalero, and Devil in the North Woods plus many historical articles — and have spent a lot of time researching everything I could find on the subjects. I used a lot of historical facts, events, and stories…but never did I need to violate anyone’s copyright to do so.
I usually assume, rightly or wrongly, that those who make the most noise about how copyright protections restrict the furtherance of art, science, etc. are mostly those with limited creativity themselves.
I wouldn’t mind if Congress rewrote the law to limit copyright protection to the life of the creator. That would be completely reasonable, even if it means that Mickey Mouse falls into the public domain. Disney Inc. will survive somehow I suspect.
So, where do you fall in the copyright as protection vs. copyright as license to steal debate?
