Abolish Copyrights

Posted: 2/21/2015

Trigger

Just read this article “Steal Our Stuff, Please Permission is hereby granted to reprint these essays in whole or in part”. I agree with most of what the author has written in following excerpt.

I have previously blogged here several times about copyrights.

The Essence

I excerpted the salient part of this long article (emphasis added):

“To be sure, in a truly free market, there would be no such thing as the institution of copyright at all, simply because ideas are not subject to the constraints of ownership. You can own a book. You can own a CD. You can own a film reel. You can own an image. But the ideas and images and arrangements of notes they broadcast publicly are not scarce goods and therefore not commodifiable or excludable absent the use of aggressive force.

The history of copyright itself is bound up with the state and its ambitions to control the population, the same as any other government plan. In the 16th-century political struggles of England, Queen Elizabeth had an idea for suppressing religious dissent. She declared that the government had to approve anything printed. It was the first action of what eventually became known as copyright. It was a tool for censorship through the creation of monopolies.

As the centuries went on, copyright took on new forms, but the principle remained the same. Government would assign rights to what should really be free for all. Even then, modern copyright didn’t become what it is today until the late 19th century (internationalized with the Berne Convention of 1886), meaning that most authors and composers didn’t use it.

Did authors make money without copyright? Of course they did. So did composers, sculptors, painters, and architects. They all relied on good marketing and the first-mover advantage to promote their works. Before the Berne Convention, copyright could only be enforced within a nation’s borders, which is why so many American schoolkids in the 19th century were reading British literature. It was possible to print and distribute cheaply, unlike the protected American literature.

In the course of the 20th century, the law became ever tighter. Copyright once lasted 28 years. You had to apply for it to be “protected” by it. Today, copyright is automatic. And it lasts not only throughout your lifetime, but up to 70 years past your death. Such ridiculous terms are a result of lobbying by powerful commercial interests like the Walt Disney Company — even though Disney made its corporate empire by taking from the commons! The extension has been a disaster for literature, causing many decades of great writing to vanish into the ether rather than be put online for the world.

Even now, major sectors of economic life thrive without copyright. There is no copyright in the design of clothing, for example, which is one reason that fashion is such an exciting and competitive industry. You can’t copyright recipes, and yet somehow, recipe books and restaurants thrive. It’s the same with fonts, football plays, and architecture. Without “intellectual property,” which really just creates a government-protected monopoly, you get that beautiful market feature called competition.”

I may add that a number of service industries (e.g. tourism) are generally not copyright or trademark or patent protected.

Not only have authors the first mover advantage, they can always write more original literature or give public performances or teach about writing etc. to make a living.