Even more so: Patents only last 20 years, registered designs a mere 10 years. Only trademarks have the potential to be perpetual.

In the software industry 20 years is way too long – it might as well be forever. Patents grant a monopoly where even provable independent invention is not a defence against infringement. Its easy to infringe without even knowing that you are doing so.

Something along the lines of 5-7 years would be more appropriate giving the inventor sufficient time to use the exclusive rights to make money without unduly holding back progress.

The better focussed question is who has the rights to profit from the intellectual property. Society has always (that ALWAYS, without exception) held that there’s a balance between the creators right to profit (which invites incentive to produce wondrous things) and society’s right to benefit from the creations of the society; that supported the creator’s education, health etc.

That’s why copyright is limited to life of author, plus 70 years. The US recently made us increase that from 50, under the FTA. Obviously, we need to be able to read Shakespeare and Dickens without some idiot descendant 84 times removed slapping a writ down.

Even more so: Patents only last 20 years, registered designs a mere 10 years. Only trademarks have the potential to be perpetual.

The logic is an attempt to balance individual creator’s rights against social needs (eg for groundbreaking medicine at non-extortionate monopoly prices).

And sometimes compulsory licensing regimes make an owner provide benefits before that time is up.

Whereas you can hand your house down, in theory, until time ends.

So, next time you see a DVD declaim “ITS TEH SAME AS THEFT!”; bear in mind that as a society, we don’t actually see it quite like that in practice, and never really have.

‘We need more artists to help us make sense of the world around us and I’m loathe to advocate for radical changes that might make their professional lives harder than they already are.’

or something like that.

d

Fine, I’ve not defended copyright infringement in this thread and I don’t think you’ll find I’ve ever gone further than advocating a broad ‘fair use’ defense against infringement. We need more artists to help us make sense of the world around us and I’m

I entered this discussion to argue the point that copyright infringement is not theft and the quote from Justice Blackmun I posted explains the distinction clearly. There are different sorts of property and owners/possessors have a variety of rights. Trying to reduce every infringement on those rights to “theft” leads to diabolical misunderstandings, muddled thinking and bad policies and laws (oops, my idealism is showing).

d

It’s probably legally defensible, but is a perversion of the original intention of copyright (which was supposed to force people to publish their works so that they would not be withheld from public knowledge). The problem boils down to an inability to collect licensing fees – something that could be addressed with a universal licensing scheme like we used to have on blank cassettes and CD’s in some countries.

However, the move of most of the commercial, non-Apple retailers of music to unprotected MP3′s seem a lot more sensible (emusic first, now Bigpond music and 7digital for example) – people generally value convenience over price if the price isn’t onerous (I certainly do) so finding something relatively obscure quickly rather than having to wait days for some torrent to finish is a massive inducement to shell out cash for said music. It’s the reason that those proper indie CD places were less affected than K-Mart for cd sales, but the record companies didn’t see it.

Fine @ 72 – you won’t have any argument from me that copyright infringement is illegal. However I believe that the laws behind copyright are in urgent need of review but if you work from the assumption that any copying without the permission of the copyright owner is equivalent to theft, we won’t get the reforms that we need.

Intellectual property (copyright/patents etc) is a pretty artificial protection granted by government legislation – it doesn’t really compare well with say property rights, because IP infringement does not deprive the owner of use of their IP, unlike when property is stolen.

The aim behind IP laws is not so that people can make money, but it is to encourage the creation of content and more generally the development of ideas. The changes in technology over the last few decades have radically changed how easily people can build upon existing IP as well as making it much cheaper for content creators to create copies. And in many ways the reuse and development of ideas is occurring at a much faster rate.

So we need to review rights given to copyright holders such as the length of copyright, fair-use rights, patent rights etc. We should be optimising our laws to maximise the creation of content and ideas, not the profits of copyright holders. And FWIW as a software developer and someone who has had patent approved, I too rely on IP legislation.

I’m not arguing that IP infringement is not wrong, but as I said, for me the point of this discussion is to open up exactly how and why such actions are wrong and what kinds of sanctions should be available.

The incorrect claim that IP infringement is the same as common theft acts to shut this discussion down.

There has been a lot of legalistic precision in here, but for me the point is to expose the question-begging involved in the formulation “IP infrngement is wrong because it is theft and theft is wrong”

What is the question that is being begged here, Martin?

That theft is wrong?

The question I ask is when is it right, or wrong, to do something which deprives that creator of their hard earned income?

Sure, but there’s a whole lot there to be unpacked. Does something enter the public domain after it’s earned a million dollars in profit, for example?

More seriously, you have to demonstrate to what extent the common copyright infringements do deprive the creators of income. All we can say with confidence is assuming that every infringement is a sale foregone is a gross overestimate while saying that no infringements have an impact on income is a gross underestimate. (And that’s before we consider other reasons why creators might not get much more income, as discussed by Darryl.)