How many writers could make a living today without royalties? You might claim that the “good ones” would still write; I know that I enjoy reading stuff written by people who wouldn’t write if it didn’t earn them a living, so I’d be worse off without copyright.

And I did say that current terms were too long. 40 years gets 99% of the revenue (100% for a large majority of items); I suggested life + 10 so as to avoid the insult to a living author of someone else doing bad things to his writing (and the +10 so that a publisher will buy the rights to an old book by an old author).

But a clause that says “If something stays out of print for a year anybody can reproduce it for a statutory payment” is also reasonable.

True story: I have been trying to find a copy of the game System Shock 2. The original publisher no longer produces it, no retail shops have copies of it, no online stores have copies of it. It was published on August 11, 1999 (according to Wikipedia), less than 10 years ago. The developers and publisher have already made ALL the money they are going to make out of this intellectual property. But it won’t be legal for anyone who has it to make a copy and give it to me for decades.

If copyright represents society at large giving up the legal ability to do whatever the hell they want with intellectual property they acquire access to, for the greater good of providing incentives that cause more intellectual property to be created, then there’s no possible justification for it to last this long. I know software IP often has a very short commercial lifespan, but still for almost everything I can think of the vast bulk of the profits from sale of a work comes in a relatively small number of years after the first publication of a work.

This must explain why so few great works of art and literature were produced before the advent of copyright laws.

Just think what Michelangelo, DaVinci, Bach, Chaucer, et al might have accomplished if only they’d had some kind of incentive to be creative! Maybe they’d have made something that was actually GOOD.

My point here is that while it seems logical to assume that protecting “intellectual property” in the same way as a tangible commodity would encourage production of said works, artists (and art) would still exist without it; and good artists would still be able to make a living just fine without it. There might be fewer artists; but considering the dubious quality of some of the “art” that is out there in these days of Youtube and Twitter, that might actually be a good thing.

Now, I’m not in favor of abolishing copyright completely, but it seems to me that shortening copyright terms to, say, 10 years, regardless of the creator’s lifespan, would be sufficient to ensure they get fairly compensated for their “product”. This would blunt the current phenomenon of large media corporations sucking up every film, song, poem and book that comes along and charging the bejeesus out of it for a century or more.

This could actually do more to encourage new work, also. Why would a record label, for instance, want to fund new artists when they can just keep reselling Led Zeppelin’s Greatest Hits over and over again?

And maybe it would do the artists some good to know that they can’t just rest on their laurels for a great album/book/movie they made 20 years ago? Wouldn’t that create more incentive for them to go out and produce something new?

If there were no such thing as intellectual property rights, fewer people would write books (and those who still did would spend less time writing, because they’d also have to earn a living doing something else).

On the other hand, there’s no reason for copyright to last umpteen centuries; something like minimum(40 years, life+10) would work fine. No author is going to think “I’m old, so I’ll only get royalties for 40 years instead of 75, so it’s not worth writing another book.”

It’s especially corrupt to increase copyright terms for stuff previously created; you can’t incent someone to have done something 40 years ago, he either did it or not.

(E.g. I’ve just been outside running, it’s hot, and I’m very thirsty. The value of a bottle of water is $10, so when I pass a vendor selling them for $2 I buy one. There’s another runner who is just as thirsty, but he earns less, so he puts the value at $.80 and doesn’t buy.)

Value is essentially independent of production cost. The fact that I place a higher value on something than it costs to produce is the reason it can be sold to me at a profit.

Profits will tend toward a common rate across all endeavors that are close enough together that they compete with one another.

In fact, economists use the term “excess profit” to refer to any profit that any business makes that’s above that of other nearby businesses–and suggest that excess profit will generally be competed out of existence.

Whatever the more-profitable business is doing–using better technology, better industrial processes, better marketing, whatever–will be copied and the profit gap will close (partial exception cases for things like patents and trade secrets where copying is hard or illegal.)

For this to happen, though, the businesses have to be competitors, which may be the reason Smith restricts his analysis to geographical regions. Within a local area, though, profits of even completely different kinds of business will tend to converge–because who’s going to run a mill if a tannery is twice as profitable? (Even if none of the mill owners is bold enough to change businesses, the next guy who starts a new business will surely target the most profitable field.)

This seems to strike at the heart of the modern controversy of “intellectual property” vs more tangible property. How much value should be given to the innovator, the idea-maker, vs the person whose raw labor actually produces a tangible commodity?

Is the idea leading to the tangible result of the innovation something that should be held in perpetuity by the inventor, and his descendants, or at some point be passed over into the public domain for common benefit of all? If so, how long a period should this be? Should an idea or innovation be protected in trust for the progeny of the innovator at all?