This section discusses generally the subject of Criminal Infringement of Copyright Under 17 U.S.C.A. § 506, how to determine the facts essential to Criminal Infringement of Copyright Under 17 U.S.C.A. § 506, and, to some extent, how to prove it in litigation and defense. Related topics are also addressed.
About the fairness of inheritence in general, which unfortunately got sidetracked into the specifics of real property because he used land as an example, I would to comment. There are an awful lot of very wealthy people who are very wealthy, not because of anything they actually did, but because their ancestors (and sometimes ancestors in the distant past) were able to successfully acquire wealth and transfer it to their descendants. This wealth appears in a number of forms, of which land is only one, and so the responses Marconi got relating specifically to land are mostly beside the point. So, without getting bogged down on side issues that relate to the specifics of real property, would someone care to respond to Marconi’s larger point, which is that it’s no more unfair to be able to transfer a copyright six or seven generations down the road than it is to transfer, say, money from a trust fund. Or stocks. Or priceless art works. Or ownership of a fabulously successful company. In all of those cases, the inheritees did nothing more to deserve that property than to simply choose the right parents.
In each of the other cases of property,; artwork, land, stocks, even money, there is something physical being transferred from owner to owner. The original book or script written could in this manner be passed down to heirs and retain a value, just look at how much first editions are worth nowadays.
However you are arguing that an idea should be able to be handed down over time.
Does your argument extend to technology and inventions? If the 7 companies who came together to create the USB standard had patented it instead of making a standard, every single device that uses that interface would have to pay a fee to use it.
Now imagine those companies owning that forever.
What about ball bearings, copper cables, Wi-Fi routers, WD40, etc.
I have done research and development on pumps. We knew that as soon as we put the patent in play our clock started counting down and that was our window to make money.
I have also been with companies that have taken a now obsolete patent that was at one time patented and improved it. The technology we created used better components and was several times better than the original, however if the patent had not expired a year previous we never would have been able to create it without massive legal fees. We then made money off of it and several other companies produced their own versions. Two were actually superior to our own. Yet if that patented hadn’t expired we would never have even attempted it.
In every example listed you are talking about a specific item, say the Mona Lisa, or a house, $500, 12 shares of Exxon, A first edition of Oliver Twist; this is comparing apples to oranges.
I think it’s necessary to get bogged down in the details.
The key difference between copyright on the one hand and land and a priceless work of art on the other is that land and the artwork do not need to be sustained by the law. There is no law that assures the continued existence of land or artwork that, if repealed, would cause land or artwork to vanish. The law merely addresses the legal rights of people in respect of land or artwork that exist anyway.
Money and stock are different than land and artwork, since money and stock are created by laws. I suppose you could imagine a world where money was not fungible, because each dollar expired after a while. I have trouble really wrapping my head around what this would do to the way money is used, and I have no idea whether it might be a good idea or not. Stock could also be made limited in life, by forbidding perpetual companies. This would certainly change the way companies operate, and maybe it would be better. Again, I don’t know.
I think the point is that any legally-created property is created to serve a particular objective, and perhaps these objectives are better served by perpetual property and perhaps they aren’t. I don’t see any real use for superficial consistency, since the underlying policy objectives are so different.
Intellectual property is not property. As understood at the Founding, your ideas were, by default, in the public domain. Copyright is a short term statutory monopoly designed to compensate authors for their contributions to the intellectual life of society as a whole. This makes sense since other forms of property are valuable because they are exclusive. If you eat my ham sandwich, I can’t eat it. But if you read my novel, Marconi Darwin and millions of others can still read it at the same time. If you copy my novel, however, that reduces the market for it, in that it allows people to read it without paying me. To incentivise me to write my novel, the Crown gave me a right to recover your profits if you copied my novel without my permission. But because part of my contribution to society comes from the fact that others could build on my ideas, my monopoly doesn’t last long. Otherwise, I reap all the benefit of my creation without the attendant benefit to society.
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