[Conscience of a Conservative]

As a writer and the spouse of a composer, I disgree. The copyright laws are too lax and limited - they should be perpetual, just like property ownership.

That would be unconstitutional:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

[GCC Catholic]

As a writer and the spouse of a composer, I disgree. The copyright laws are too lax and limited - they should be perpetual, just like property ownership.

That would be unconstitutional:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

kabumpo... the whole purpose of the constitutional protection for intellectual property is to encourage creators to continue to create by ensuring that, for a time, they can profit from their ideas. But the ultimate principle behind it is to promote the progress of science and useful arts.

Protecting IP perpetually stifles this goal, because those who stand to perpetually profit from one great idea are dissuaded from continuing to produce great ideas. Additionally, perpetual protections would limit innovation based on previous ideas - either by limiting the knowledge that others have, or making it financially unfeasible (through royalties, etc.) to improve a previous idea.

If anything, the current copyright laws are too restrictive. 28 years (and 14 more if you bother to pay attention to renew) -- the provisions of the Copyright Act of 1831 -- are plenty enough. The idea that one work should provide royalties for the entire lifetime of the author plus several generations (as is currently the case) is patently absurd.

[Arthalion]

And there's good reason for that limitation. Copyrights and patents are inherently unnatural and ungodly creations. To say that you own an idea flies in the face of our core social programming. We hear ideas, we repeat them. We see good ideas, we want to reproduce them. That's the way we work, the way God made us. It's how manking betters itself.

Britain in the 17th century recognized the value in allowing creators the ability to benefit exclusively from their creations. The cost of invention was rising, and it was only fair to allow those creators to benefit from their creations after they'd invested their own time and money into them. This encouraged people to create new things, which benefited society. Still, the inventors of copyright ALSO realized that they were fundamentally harming society by preventing these good and useful inventions from being more widely used. So, we limit patents and copyright. The creator is allowed a period of profit, and then the government gets out of the equation and allows the free market to do its thing. Copyrights and patents are inherently socialistic and anti-market concepts (it's government protection and regulation of business), and SHOULD be limited as much as possible.

The founders of our own country recognized the same thing, which is why our Constitution grants the ability to offer copyright and patent for a limited period.