Still trying to understand the thread’s confusion it occurs to me that some Dopers might simply be unaware that Copyright terms were extended in 1998, even for already-dead creators. The creator of Winnie the Pooh had been dead 42 years when his rights were extended.
(Googling, I see there is a lawsuit in which Disney and Milne’s granddaughter are on the same side, but its details, however interesting, may be tangential to this discussion.)
Exactly. Many people seem to have the bizarre idea that their kind of property should be protected but not other peoples’ kind of property. This wouldn’t pass the smell test in an average Kindergarten dispute, but for some reason entire political philosophies seem to be built around it and people pretend that’s respectable.
No, what some of us are saying is that using the word “property” to describe copyrights and patents and trademarks, is incorrect and misleading to begin with. It is a form of the fallacy known as “poisoning the well”: trying to bias the debate in advance by slanting one’s choice of terminology towards the desired conclusion.
It is not a self-evident fact at all that a government-granted monopoly should be considered equivalent to ownership of a piece of physical property. Or that the existence of such monopolies is a good thing in the first place.
Just for the record: as a software developer by profession, I spend 40 hours per week “creating intellectual property”, so there is no truth to the accusation that I want to have different rules for other people than for myself.
An established near-term contract, maybe. But 70+years of future income and rights that can also continue to be passed on willy-nilly to secondary heirs not even born yet?
“Ownership of a piece of physical property” IS “a government-granted monopoly”.
You own your car. You have a monopoly over how it is used. I can’t come and drive it without your permission. If I do you can get the government to make me stop.
Copyrights are just as “real” as mineral rights, or stock options, or pork futures. They exist, like all forms of property, because we pass laws to MAKE them exist. It’s reasonable to argue about what form copyright should take from a practical perspective (What rules produce the best outcome for society?) but treating copyright as some sort of perversion of “natural” ownership is bizarre. It ignores the socially constructed nature of ALL forms of ownership.
Yeah, thanks, The Hamster King. Ownership of land – this is most evident with absentee ownership of land, where one is not physically sitting on the property – is no more real than ownership of software, it’s simply older.
A lot of people don’t think about this very clearly; I’m not sure why. Maybe because it’s easier for them personally to take intellectual property, thanks to music-sharing sites and photocopiers. In the 60s, when hippie types wandered around, they occasionally expressed the feeling that land ownership was immoral and wrongheaded (my point being that, by “squatting” or trespassing, the hippies found it easy to abrogate property rights, much like modern kids with computers find it easy to copy a lot of intellectual property).