Except that words that you write down on paper aren’t yours by divine right, they are yours because everyone else agrees that they are yours. Your assertion that your works are YOURS is just that, an assertion. WHY are they yours? If you want us to assent to your views, then you should perhaps give some reason for us to do so, rather than simply repeating your assertion.
The common sense view of patents and copyrights is that they are a human-created method of advancing the useful arts and sciences. Copyright is obviously a method that presumes a certain level of technology to make sense.
In medieval times, copyright law would have made no sense. The only way to create a book was to laboriously copy it by hand, the work of months or years. Every copy of a book was precious. There was really no market for books for sale, if someone wanted a copy of a book they would be more likely to hire someone to create a copy rather than attempt to find an owner of an existing copy who wanted to sell. No one authored books with the intention of making money, it was impossible. And the only way for an author’s work to survive would be if enough people thought the work was valuable enough to spend months working to create a copy. There was no percieved shortage of content, because the amount of total books in the world was limited…more copies of one work would probably mean fewer copies of another work. Books degraded over the decades, and so lots of labor had to be done just to maintain the same number of copies of a work. No one expected authors to be able to control their work, since the vast majority of authors were dead and had been dead for hundreds or thousands of years.
But of course the printing press changed that. Suddenly books could be created in order to sell them. A market for books began. More physical numbers of books could be created than there were works to fill those books. Suddenly there was a market for NEW books. Someone could write a book, have a printer make hundreds of copies, and sell those books, and make a living. But of course, if someone else can just print the same books there is no incentive to actually write books. Since state control was also increasing at this time, the idea arose that the state could grant an author a monopoly over his own work, since this would encourage the production of new work. And this is essentially what we have today, with the addition of the notion that a corporation can own a work rather than a human being. But note that this scheme requires the existance of strong governmental controls…you have to have courts and policemen to enforce the author’s monopoloy over making copies of his work.
And also note that the scheme presupposes a certain level of technological ease of copying. If creating a copy takes months of manual labor, copyright makes no sense. If copying a work can be done but requires a large capital investment, but once the investment is made unlimited copies can be produced, then our current system makes sense. Copyright violators are deterred because their copying facilities are centralized, they have a lot to lose from a judgement, and there are a limited number of copying facilities due to the large capital investment required. The publishing houses also act as a cartel, they essentially agree not to make unauthorized copies of each other’s works in exchange for similar agreements. Enforcement is not often needed, since the publishing houses mostly refrain voluntarily. They don’t want to see copyright weakened, since it would reduce the value of their own assets.
Now people might object to the words “monopoly” or “cartel”, since these are loaded words. But I believe they are accurate words. And the copyright scheme worked well during the age of industrial copying. Monopolies granted to authors was a good scheme to advance the useful arts and sciences.
But of course, now we have an entirely new technology. Copying a file and distributing it over the internet is trivial. And the copiers have little incentive to voluntarily refrain from violating copyright, since unlike the industrial publishing houses they have essentially no assets of their own that could be devalued under a different copyright scheme. Copying is now trivial. Distribution is now trivial. Enforcing copyright in the information age will become more and more difficult, and eventually become impossible. Our current copyright scheme makes no more sense today than it would have made in the days of handwritten manuscripts.
That isn’t to say that we don’t need some method of compensating authors. But note that our current scheme is not tightly coupled to the USE of the information in a work…I can buy a paperback, read it, lend it to 100 friends, they can all read it, I can sell it to a used bookstore, someone can buy it and read it, lend it to 100 friends, donate it to a library, the library can loan it 100 times, then sell it where it ends up in a basement. And the only time the author got any compensation was the first time I purchased a physical copy of the book. Control over copying was an acceptable proxy since control over copying was POSSIBLE in the industrial age. Control over the individual copy was impossible, and so was never even considered as a method of compensating authors.
So we desperately need some other method of advancing the useful arts and sciences other than copyrights. I don’t know exactly what that method will be, other than a few vague ideas. But our current system is unenforceable, or will be in the very near future. An unenforceable law is worse than no law since it will only be used capriciously by the powerful to punish their enemies. But all schemes of compensating authors must be based on the principle of advancing the useful arts and sciences…or else the vast majority of people have no incentive to cooperate in such a scheme. Perhaps an author does have a natural human right to the exclusive use of his work…but if so you can’t just assert that an author does, you have to convince the rest of us that we should authorize the courts, jails, and policemen to attempt to enforce that right. Your asserted right is meaningless unless the vast majority of people agree that your right exists. Convince them that an exclusive right to make copies advances the usefull arts and sciences and they’ll probably assent. But if it no longer advances the above, asserting your rights in shriller and shriller tones probably won’t work.
