[HopefulPatriot]

"Protecting the writings of David Baldacci is "morality" with a little 'm'. Saving the lives of millions is "morality" with a giant 'M'."

It is the little "m" concept that you seem to malign that makes the big "M" idea conceptually possible. Most socialists suffer from the same Mistake. Sadly, as beneficial as copyrights and patents have been, there is nothing without a few warts. Here are some of the warts:

1. Copyright protections are too long and result in multiples of patent protections for inventions. The genuine dissemination of knowledge and useful information is impeded by the excessively prolonged copyright protection.
2. The quantity of inventions and the scope of their complexities are advancing or already have advanced beyond the human capacity to discriminate between their complexities making the task of determining infringement increasingly arbitrary rather than concretely factual.
3. Digital technology takes the policing of copyrights to much higher levels of difficulty, somewhat analogous to the problem with patents.
4. These two problems are going to become exponentially more difficult to resolve in the future.

I have not researched the history of copyrights and patents, but am a bit surprised to learn the concept only dates to Franklin and the mind of one man. Regardless of whether Franklin is the Father Of Imtellectual Protection or not, it is the catalyst that made modern capitalism possible. And if I am correct, that the complexities of determining infringement threaten to completely undermine their usefulness, one cannot help but wonder how capitalism itself will adapt to the transition and what the changes will be.

[Glenn]

Most socialists suffer from the same Mistake.

Do you think an uneducated mother in a third world country with a dying child has a political ideology?

[Congressman Billybob]

I stand corrected. The idea of limited patents for a set period of time appears in the Statute of Anne, 1709. And Franklin would have been aware of this law, since it was litigated in the House of Lords, and upheld, just before Franklin made his first visit to London.

Still, the form of the actual clause that worked far better in the US than the Statute of Anne did in England, was devised by Franklin.

John / Billybob