Jeff’s post this morning touched on some issues that are near and dear to my heart so I thought I’d expand on them. Fiirst, Jeff writes:
“If a work, once created, is forever encumbered by restrictions, it cannot be used in a derivative way…”
That’s almost right. It can be used but it would need to be approved and licensed from the copyright holder. That reduces the incentives for such use. And that’s the fundamental problem with copyright: it’s based on a flawed model of creativity and de-incentivizes precisely what we should want to incentivize.
Let’s revisit the Jefferson quote that Jeff cited:
“It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain…”
That’s a pretty fair description of the model of creativity on which our notions of copyright are based. Ideas spring from “an individual brain” like Athena from the brow of Zeus (the mythological image of the act of inspiration). The problem is that that’s not how new ideas are made. Every idea is derived from other ideas. We combine, revise, and alter existing ideas and come up with new ones. Want more novel creations? Then facilitate the creation of new ideas from old ones—abolish copyright.
Copyright just doesn’t incentivize the creation of ideas—it incentivizes their distribution. In a pre-Internet world in which distribution had risks that may have been a pretty good plan. But in today’s world it just isn’t necessary. What copyrights do (when held by a record company or an entertainment company rather than an actual human creator) is reduces the risk to a distributor (which is unnecessary) since the recovery period can be spread over a longer timeframe.
And, of course, extending a copyright doesn’t provide incentives for creation at all. How can after the fact extensions motivate anything?
Somewhere around here I’ve got some interesting numbers. Since passing the 1999 Copyright Extension Act the absolute number of copyrights applied for has fallen (and, of course, the copyrights per thousand population has fallen even faster). Nice job on the incentivizing.
