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?
In: Other
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.
Latest Answers