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  • Jan 29, 2014 @ 12:11pm

    Re: Oh yeh right

    "The public domain whereby rights in private property are stripped from the owners without compensation."

    The owners have already received their compensation -- during the copyright term -- in the form of state-sanctioned and court-enforced right to stop others from copying, using, or building upon the copyrighted work. Why do you think that it is theft for the government to say, "We will enforce this exclusive right of yours, but only for a limited time"?

    No one is taking your car from you. But your owning a car is not the same as the government saying that only you may own a car.

    Not all property works the same. IP is a tradeoff. The state says, "In order to encourage you to invest blood, sweat and tears into your invention, we will grant you a right, for 20 years, to STOP other people from using your invention." It is a right of exclusion, rather than a right of use, and that right of exclusion comes with a built-in expiration date. Which is what Art. 1, sec. 8 of the US Constitution expressly intends when it talks about "a limited time."