Why Do You Create?

pudge on 2003-01-15T18:27:57

The Supreme Court of the United States seems to think people create is because, in part, because of the possibility of extensions to existing copyright terms. That is, "I would not write this song if the copyright term were onnly my life plus 70 years, as the existing term states, but only if there is the possibility that the term is increased, someday."

Or, in their words:

The CTEA may also provide greater incentive for American and other authors to create and disseminate their work in the United States. ... (the United States could not play a leadership role in the give-and-take evolution of the international copyright system, indeed it would lose all flexibility, if the only way to promote the progress of science were to provide incentives to create new works).

[Note that the justification here is taken from a law review paper by Shira Perlmutter, a vice president of AOL Time Warner.]

But this justification has nothing to do with the promoting of science and the useful arts by securing, for limited times, exclusive rights to writings and discoveries by authors and inventors. What it does is promote the exploitation of those writings and discoveries, not their existence, nor their creation. And if exploitation is the goal, then why not have more limited terms, to achieve maximum exploitation by the public? Because they care more about business, apparently, than the public good, even when the public good is Constitutionally protected.

Now Playing: One More Day, One More Night - Tom Petty (Echo)

[Note: if you saw weird chars here before or in email or something, I copied and pasted from Acrobat into BBEdit, which turned the document into Unicode or something ... urgh.]