but I am surprised to see it in a libertarian venue, which generally holds a more favorable view towards individual rights rather than social implications.
You have to first determine what the individual right is. How far does the right extend. Is it a natural right or a possibly arbitrary individual right granted by law? Does it conflict with other rights? I don't think that giving someone unlimited control over their inventions or ideas is supported by any reasonable natural rights claim. I don't think the right involved in intellectual property is quite on the level of the rights to physical property. If I take your car you have been harmed or violated in some way. If I photocopy an article you wrote to give to a friend I'm not sure that I would support a claim that your rights have been violated. I think the copyright holder has a legitimate interest in his work that should be balanced against other interests. I also think that some recent laws go to far. In some cases they prevent fair use, and they also intrude on how people can use non-copyrighted items. Furthermore I think copyrights should not be perpetual. Stories, songs, articles ect. should IMO eventually enter in to the public domain. In theory copyrights are not perpetual but in effect they are because every time some of Disney's important copyrights are about to expire Disney gets congress to extend the copyright. I'm glad that we don't have to track down the heirs of Bach or whoever wrote the story of Gilgamesh every time we want to use those works or derivatives of them.
I'd like to see fair use strengthened. In a purely legal sense I'd probably only want to return to the way it used to be before some recent laws, but beyond that I'd like to see more copyright holders be more flexible in how they allow people to use their ideas instead of suing people who put up fan fic sites.
I do not think that there is a libertarian argument, per se, for the denial of copyright passing to one's heirs. There is a "common good" argument, which holds that the incentive to create is maintained by a fixed limit of years, while the reversion to public domain enriches the general culture
I agree with that but I would also say that IMO there is no particular reason to consider it anti-libertarian to not continue to extend the length of the copyright. I guess it depends on whether you consider the property in question to be the ideas/story/invention/song/movie/book/whatever or to be just the right to control it for a certain period of time. I think that by law and custom the creator does have a property right to control the use of the ideas for a certain period of time, but I don't think their is a natural right directly over the idea or ideas themselves.
Tim |
