Comment Re:They Should Lose Public Protection (Score 5, Informative) 225
And this still works perfectly well today, thank you very much.
Perfectly well? Really? Do you realize how many works are completely lost, from film, to music, to software to any other creative field simply because they never entered the public domain and copyright holders either disappeared or held them tightly in their grasp? On top of that, you have corporations like Disney whose entire existence was built on the works of others now abusing that same privilege to deprive future generations of their own creativity.
I wouldn't call either of those things "perfectly well".
Defending property rights of the citizenry is among the top tasks of any government.
Intellectual property is only "property" because the government, our government, labeled it as such. It shares little in common with actual property: it's not tangible, it doesn't degrade and it's not limited in quantity or duplication. Were it not for the public invention of protecting it, it would have no inherent protections. So if we receive no public benefit, why should we spend public resources defending it for them?
Are you "deprived" of food, because you have to pay for it?
Of course you are. That's an obvious statement. But it's an entirely different situation because food is a tangible product limited in quality and quantity. It has inherent protections intellectual property does not so comparing the two is asinine.