There's no such thing as intellectual property. Copyright is a limited monopoly that the public gives to an author in exchange for an author enriching the public with his works. If the public is never to enjoy the full enrichment that comes from the work (such as being able to use it for the basis of other stories, the way we do with Shakespeare), then the intent of copyright is being perverted.

"No one except perhaps Hamilton or Franklin might have imagined that services and intellectual property would become primary fields of endeavor and the chief engines of the economy."

What bullshit. Ideas already were the "chief engines" in their time, a somewhat famous period called the "Industrial Revolution". The crown forbade the transfer of manufacturing knowledge, textile mill plans, etc, on pain of death. The Colonies were forced to sell raw materials cheap and buy manufactured goods dear.

The author also conflates the problem of publishing cartels with copyright, jangling an image of the poor starving writer brutalized by the pinko copyleft junta. He gives it away: the author gets 10% of sales while the publisher gets 50%. Who, then, is to benefit most from unlimited copyright? Why should we worry about the yachts of the writer's grandchildren when the writer is being robbed blind in his own lifetime?

- Once a copyright expires, the physical medium encoding the work (book, CD, etc...) becomes a commodity, which anyone can replicate. Under good competition, the profit from selling those should be very small. Even moreso in the digital age.

- The article complains a lot that everything is inherited, except IP protection. One can look at it in the opposite direction: these days, many rich people are coming out against inherited wealth. Taxing it to a larger extent than normal would make sense, from a mechanism design point of view. My guess is that this cannot be done effectively; people would just start giving away their property to their children before dying, escaping the "death tax". Copyrights are easier to take away, because they have a natural owner.

Copyrights and patents don't exist to protect their inventor. They provide an incentive for people to create IP, which is beneficial to society. Extending IP rights tends to increase the incentive. On the other hand, works in the public domain are sources of wealth in their own right (esp. patents). Thus, there is a critical amount of protection X, where society is best served. X varies with the field, technological status, and other things.

The inventor's well-being is only a side-effect of this optimization problem. The same argument applies against claims that taxes "steal" from people. It's all just a big incentive structure. Nothing personal.

OK, let's get rid of copyright and instead require individuals wanting some protection for their works to publish under Creative Commons Licenses.

Copyright can't be forever because it's too restrictive. Information wants to be free.

I don't see why copyright should extend past the life of the creator.

This is quite a provacative article. I don't think I agree with its conclusions, but still an insightful read.

It's amazing how poorly people can use reason. The author is a good example. He feels that if he can make an analogy -- however strained it might be -- that he has won his point.

Obviously he's wrong. An idea is not physical property. He gives a passing nod to the founding fathers but fails to mention any part of the debate that led to the copyright/patent clause. Jefferson, for one, says that it is ridiculous to treat an idea as if it existed in the physical world. That's why they settled for "limited monopoly" -- because they recognized that you can only live in a fantasy world for so long.

I guess if I had to answer this guy directly -- the question posed in his headline -- I might say:

Great ideas do not live forever. They need to evolve and have the benefit of other minds to hack at them, to improve them. Ask Walt Disney. He took the ideas in the stories of the Brothers Grimm -- horrifying stories, if you've ever read them -- and made them new, as well as palatable. Every idea has its time, and its author does deserve a short monopoly as a congratulations. Then it's others' turn. And in my book, that limited time is very, very short: perhaps five years, perhaps even less.

Ideas benefit from hacking. If we want to stifle creativity and innovation, we should freeze them in time with laws. If our aim is the opposite, then we should consider giving them lives of their own. You're right: ideas live. But things can only live if you are willing to give them freedom.