It’s always been curios to me that the author or inventor or artist doesn’t own the rights to their work for all time. Why do these things expire?
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People don’t life forever, is an immediate reason. More than that, there is (or used to be) a general idea that all of society needs to be able to use new ideas and inventions in order to progress. If Gutenberg’s family still had exclusive rights to use printing presses, where would we be? IP is maybe a little different, but maybe not. Lots of IP isn’t just mickey mouse, it’s things like code, that are effectively digital machines. And even with characters or books, I personally don’t like to live in a world where every single piece of culture is privately owned by some conglomerate or another
Intellectual property is inherently unnatural. Common-sense ethics doesn’t say nobody is allowed to copy your good idea for how to do a task, or retell a story you told.
But lawmakers in the early modern era wanted to encourage *being an inventor* or *writing books* as a career or profession, because inventions and books make the world a better place. So they invented patents (er, patents had been around before they were for inventions, they just repurposed them) and copyright, to let those workers make a living off of it.
But remember, the whole point was to furnish society with books and songs and technology. Ideally for free, if for no other reason than that you can spend an unlimited amount of legal effort arguing about who owns what parts of what ideas. So the special rights, to enable inventors and researchers and artists and writers to sell their work, have a time limit, after which society can collect the benefits of the works it’s helped enable to be written.
There are two ways to view copyright. One, it is an economical protection. Two, it protects the integrity of the art on a personal level. Common law countries (Canada, USA, UK) tend to favour the former, while civil law (France, Germany) tend to favour the latter.
In common law countries, copyright exists to give the creator economic benefits, but at the same time not stifle the free market of ideas. Copyright exists to initially protect creators. It incentivizes them to create things and make profit. With no protection, creativity flounders and nobody benefits. Copyright then expires to protect the market of ideas. It allows the author to profit, but once the author is dead and gone, it allows everyone else to profit. In both cases, profits are maximized.
Because if they last forever, they stifle creativity. We already have hundreds of young people saying “can I do this? Can I do that?” Well, what if every word written in the last 300 years was still under copyright? If you had to sift through everything to make sure you weren’t accidentally copying someone from ages ago.
Besides, is it really fair that someone gets money every year because their great-great grandmother wrote a book 200 years ago?
It creates a balance to make any piece of IP as useful to society as possible. Without having some sort of protection in place, no one would have any incentive to invent anything because it would be stolen and sold for cheaper by someone else who didn’t have to put the money into research and development. If it could be protected forever, no one else could ever make any sort of improvement to it to advance the technology into the future. We would have to count on the inventor themselves to make it better, but they wouldn’t necessarily even have to because they have a monopoly on the existing one.
As for art and similar works, it’s also important that people have a level of control over their creations. They should also get to benefit from their work without it being stolen. But simultaneously, after a certain amount of time, that IP basically becomes a part of the public lexicon. It would be weird if someone could’ve copyrighted Santa or something and then no one is ever able to use that character again. I think it just makes sense that something eventually becomes so ingrained in the fabric of society that we should all have access to it. And hopefully the creator was able to get the bulk of the monetary value out of it during that restrictive window when it was still protected.
On paper, the laws try to balance the right of the creator to be compensated for their original work and the right of the public to exercise their own creativity via derivative works. Eventually, the creator of a work will die. For a while, their descendants will be able to get some income from that work and the laws help to ensure that they will.
Imagine that someone who doesn’t hold the copyright to that work has an idea for something that uses an element from it. If the copyright doesn’t expire at some point, that person wouldn’t be able to profit from the idea and, romantic as it sounds, the culture wouldn’t be able to get richer from it.
First, IP laws got a bit out of hand since they were invented. I won’t dive into that, but give the original reasoning.
For the longest time, people invented stuff for various reasons. But when they wanted to make money from that stuff, they had to keep the invention secret to preserve its value. Because, why should I pay for a way to turn steam into motion if my competitors get that for free the second I use it in public?
At some point, people realised that inventing new stuff would get more and more expensive. The fear was, that it would get so expensive, that nobody could do it anymore without earning money from it (Hint: They were right.). And on the other hand, so many inventions were kept secret and no one else could build upon them, make them better or be inspired to invent something else.
So patents were invented. For the low, low price of having to publish your invention, you can now use it exclusively for a number of years.
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On the copyright side of things, it wasn’t that much different. Sure, authors never kept their books secret, but they were paid by publishers. Yes, why would a publisher pay much money for a story of they could just go to the next bookstore and buy it for the price of a printed book by their rivals?
Turned out, there was a reason. People who bought books did so when they were first published. A reprint, a month later or so, didn’t sell very well unless it was a massively popular book. So publishers concentrated on publishing new works, paying through the nose to get more and more authors to write new books to earn that sweet “we have something new!” money.
On the other side of the channel, in England, lawmakers didn’t notice that, Instead they heard the original complaint and decided to do something about it. Just like patents, you could now register your written works and get a limited time where your publisher had exclusive control over it after paying you a lump sum. It didn’t really increase the earnings of authors, and the number of new books published was quite low when compared to the continent, but publishers were happy. They could print the same book over and over without having to pay someone and sell it for the same price.
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A couple of international treaties later, and we now have those systems worldwide. A bit of lobbying on top, and publishers can earn money for way longer than the authors live.
Random side note: One of those treaties is responsible for Steamboat Willie still being protected in some countries even though it would be out of copyright there by now and is out of it in the US. :facepalm:
Who owes Shakespear works? Who owes brothers Grimm stories? Who owes owes ancient Greek mythology?
Once works are old enough, nobody owes them, they become common cultural heritage of everyone.
And you know, artists, writers and songwriters aren’t born in isolation. They learn and are influenced by those before them. There is really no such thing as 100% original work, the artist adds something original of their own, but the bulk of it… Oil paintings and portraits were all the rage long before da Vinci came along and started work on Mona Lisa.
The purpose of modern intellectual property as a legal construct is
1. to encourage invention (via patents)
2. to encourage creative works (via copyright)
3. to protect consumers and businesses from market confusion and fraud (via trademark)
Trademarks *don’t* have an expiration, because the need to make sure that the Diet Coke I buy is actually manufactured by the Coca-Cola Corporation (as opposed to Eddie down the block brewing up a batch of *something* and slapping a Diet Coke logo on it) is a need that doesn’t cease, at least as long as the business continues to exist. So trademarks don’t expire, but they *do* require the trademark owner to actively protect and use the trademarks they claim. In other words, (a) Coca-Cola must sic their lawyers on Eddie for bottling and marketing his flavored cat piss under a Coca-Cola trademark (trademarks must be actively protected) and (b) Coca-Cola cannot just claim a trademark on “Eddie’s Strawberry Surprise Cat Piss” and then never actually market a product under that trademark (trademarks must be used).
Patents and copyrights, on the other hand, have to balance encouraging invention and creation with the benefit of the rest of society and culture being able to take advantage of the fruits of those inventions or creations.
Intellectual property encourages invention and creation by granting exclusive rights to the invention or creative work (via patents or copyrights, respectively) to the inventor/creator for a fixed period of time. During that time, no one else except the inventor/creator has a right to make modifications to or derive value ($$$) from the invention or creation.†
But patent and copyright law make sure that such inventions/creations also contribute to society and culture by *not* guaranteeing *permanent* control over the invention/creation to the inventor/creator. This assures, for example, that an important invention can spread widely in an affordable manner for consumers by assuring that *eventually* anyone who wants to will be able to manufacture that invention.
† Footnote added on edit: no one else except the inventor/creator has that right *unless* the inventor/creator contractually licenses that right to someone else. Which is how almost everything intellectually property-related works at scale. E.g. if an author wants a publisher to publish their book, they don’t have to *give away* their copyright to the book; they just enter into a contractual licensing agreement with the publisher to allow them to publish (i.e. the right to make copies) for a period of time or for certain circumstances (e.g. you can license the hardback rights separately from the paperback rights separately from the audiobook rights).
One of the goals of intellectual property laws is to balance the interests of creators and inventors (and companies that employ creators and inventors) against the interests of the general public. Creators and inventors want to make money off of their ideas. The general public would benefit from those ideas being available to the public so everyone can use those ideas and potentially expand on them.
Copyrights and patents both grant the creator a temporary monopoly on their creation, giving them an opportunity to make monet off of it before it enters the public domain. Once the patent or copyright expires the idea is now available for everyone to use.
The duration for copyrights is much longer than the duration for patents. This is partly because letting patents last too long stifles innovation and allows businesses to keep prices very high, but the other reason is because Disney has aggressively lobbied congress to extend the length of copyright every time Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain.
So, because of lobbying from Disney, for a long time very little has entered the public domain, at least in the States. This has given people the impression that copyright protection is something that lasts forever. It’s not. Normally copyrighted materials should be regularly entering the public domain. This lets artists make their own adaptations of existing works of fiction. It also makes it easier for archivists to preserve things like old movies or video games, which might not be profitable enough to be worth preserving and selling.
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