Hi, Mike:

1. Glad to see that you’re willing to come up to speed on these issues, at least partially. Sorry if you decide to take that as “the claws coming out”, or whatever, but you need to actually read some of the bullshit we get from copyright apologists, not just here on Techdirt, but other places as well.

2. Copyright and patent are (and yes, folks, I’ll keep re-iterating this point every time I post), monopoly privileges granted by the State, for a strictly limited time, and for a very specific purpose. As expressed in the Constitution, to “promote the advance of science and the useful arts”. NOT so people are required to bribe the great-great-grandchildren of a song-writer every time they sing “happy birthday” at a birthday party.

http://www.unhappybirthday.com/

Ultimately, it all comes down to something called the “copyright bargain”. (The situation with patents is similar, which I’ll get to in a bit.)

One of the clearest explanations of the Copyright bargain comes from Richard Stallman over at the Electronic Freedom Foundation:

Quoting him:

“The copyright system works by providing privileges and thus benefits to publishers and authors; but it does not do this for their sake. Rather, it does this to modify their behavior: to provide an incentive for authors to write more and publish more. In effect, the government spends the public’s natural rights, on the public’s behalf, as part of a deal to bring the public more published works. Legal scholars call this concept the “copyright bargain.” It is like a government purchase of a highway or an airplane using taxpayers’ money, except that the government spends our freedom instead of our money.”

“But is the bargain as it exists actually a good deal for the public? Many alternative bargains are possible; which one is best? Every issue of copyright policy is part of this question. If we misunderstand the nature of the question, we will tend to decide the issues badly.”

“The Constitution authorizes granting copyright powers to authors. In practice, authors typically cede them to publishers; it is usually the publishers, not the authors, who exercise these powers and get most of the benefits, though authors may get a small portion. Thus it is usually the publishers that lobby to increase copyright powers. To better reflect the reality of copyright rather than the myth, this article refers to publishers rather than authors as the holders of copyright powers. It also refers to the users of copyrighted works as “readers,” even though using them does not always mean reading, because “the users” is remote and abstract.”

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html

3. Every copyright term extension represents a violation of the copyright bargain, in that somehow, those who have been *permitted the privilege of monopoly* on condition that they eventually *stop* being able to gouge other users for access to it (“sampling” clearance, etc.) just don’t want to do it. They don’t want to come through with *their* side of the bargain, which was the only thing that justified (or more exactly, excused) such monopoly privileges in the first place.
So your first, and most basic error is failing to understand that copyright and patents ARE monopoly privilges, at all. Then you compound that error by saying that you think the expiration of such monopoly privileges is “unfair”.

Think of it this way:
Say you sell corn. Should the State grant you (and your heirs) exclusive monopoly franchise over being able to sell corn? Or, how about having the State “permit” others to sell corn, but mandate that everybody else selling corn pay *you and your heirs in perpetuity* for the “privilege” of entering the corn-sale market?

That might sound like a stupid example, Mike, except for the fact that at least a perpetual monopoly franchise on corn would *require you and your heirs to CONTINUE GROWING AND SELLING CORN*. The latter situation (where your family gets to charge other corn-growers “clearance fees” in order to allow THEM to grow and sell their own corn, is more closer to situations like copyright and patent, in that your heirs would get paid to “permit” others to do something.

THe rule of thumb with stuff like copyright and patents is: the shorter and less restrictive the monopoly privileges are, the less damaging they are.

The primary reason many people (myself included) are increasingly in favor of abolishing them entirely, is simply the fact that the terms and scope of such monopoly privileges (particularly in terms of copyright length) have been increased steadily, something like forty times in the last thirty years.
To be blunt: monopolists (and wannabe monopolists) have spent decades being rapaciously greedy, and doing everything in their power to attempt to get copying-related technologies suppressed BY THE GOVERNMENT. For example, Jack Valenti from the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) compared the Consumer VCR to the Boston Strangler, during congressional hearings where his organization attempted to get the VCR banned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/31/1622232

So, again being as forceful as I know how to be without turning into a total asshole about it: if the multinational corporate megaliths who “own” the vast majority of such copyright monopolies can’t bring themselves to be satisfied with 25, 50, 75, 95, or 150 year monopolies, then they DESERVE NO MONOPOLY PRIVILEGES WHATSOEVER.

Likewise, if the evidence is amply clear that copyright and patent privileges do NOT, in fact “advance science and the useful arts”, but instead allow the aformentioned multinational corporate megaliths to collude with government in an effort to get potentially innovative/disruptive/competitive technologies suppressed — well, you get the idea.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm

Ultimately, the whole debate about how artists/inventors/creators will “get paid” absent such monopoly privileges is nothing more than a corporate-financed smokescreen. We *know* the major-labels screw artists. We *know* the organizations ostensibly responsible for collecting and distributing royalties screw artists. Further, the closest thing to the small inventor releasing a revolutionary technology on the world most of us have seen, has been the development of the very p2p (peer-to-peer) file-sharing applications which the corporate media megaliths keep trying to destroy.

It’s really very simple. A single 7-year monopoly, REQUIRING registration with the copyright or patent office, with no renewals, etc. would be *infinitely* less damaging than the current morass, but, given the frenzied efforts to get longer and longer monopolies over the past several decades, it’s extremely dubious as to whether even such very strictly limited monopoly privileges wouldn’t simply be “abused”, exactly as they are now.

Hope this clears up some of your misunderstandings.

L8r