Yes, they do. A person may be a good creator of characters, of settings, of situations, and of dialogues, and having the four abilities, produce a full original novel. Another person might be good at three, two or one of the four, and therefore unable to exercise his creativity except by means of appropriating respectively one, two or three of those from another artist.

No, they don't. Remember, copyright protects the exact expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. So you can create a comic with a Mickey Mouse-ish type character, as long as he does not look too similar to Mickey Mouse. And that's exactly what creators of content do. They steal a lot of ideas from other copyrighted content. And it's perfectly legal until the day comes when those ideas are themselves protected.

Do you pay monthly royalties to the artist who painted your living room? No? Why?

LOL, what a retarded argument. There's no royalties because that's menial work, not creative work. Maybe you can't tell the difference because you've never done creative work in your life. And royalties are paid only once per sale. So I'm only paying once if I buy a painting from the copyright owner and Apple pays only 70 cents to the copyright owner for each song sold on iTunes.

Can you explain how innovation is stifled if copyright duration is infinite? Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn't quit their company after making their first billion. A billion dollars is a lot for one person and his family. So why did they continue to work?

"first sale doctrine" and I own that copy - exclusively - and may do with it what I want.

You may not do what you want with it. You paid a lousy $10 or $50 for a copy for personal use. That's it. The actual asset may cost millions or billions. So if you pay less than $100 for something worth millions/billions, it automatically means you can't do what you want with it. Try using some common sense next time.

If you reverse engineer it, you're stealing the design. If you redistribute it, you're a pirate.

But do they continue for 70 years after they are dead?

No, but they have children and wives to feed. Why do you care who is making how much money? It's none of of your damn business. You neither created the work nor do you have any rights to it.

And it deprives the public of its cultural heritage and the ability to honor and celebrate their artists after they are gone.

How about honoring and celebrating them while they are alive or does that hurt your wallet? And it doesn't hurt your culture, because you can still buy the work from the store. It's also quite amusing to note that human culture has largely come from creative people who have gotten screwed over by the government, businesses and now, the consumers.

The world does not owe you a living. And it certainly does not owe you and your kids a lifetime of earnings for a extremely short-term amount of work.

That's exactly the point I'm trying to make: the artists don't owe you a damn thing. They created their works and so it belongs to them, and certainly not freeloaders like yourself after a certain amount of time. "Limited times" was/is a huge mistake. No one should be forcibly robbed off their property.

And what gives you the right to decide how much money someone can make off their work? Are you some kind of dictator? All works are not equal: a cashier can make $10/hr, senior engineer $100/hr, an attorney $250-$1000/hr etc. Similarly, creators and owners of copyrighted works can make hundreds to thousands of dollars/hr for their work. There is nothing stopping you from doing the same and nothing wrong with copyright owners making millions from a "short-term amount of work."

-We would still be paying the heirs of Mozart (and every other person who ever created anything original), and would have to keep track of their lineage.

We still are paying for Mozart's music if you want to listen to it on CD or iTunes. People don't listen to sheet music, you have to play that on the piano in a competent manner for people to enjoy it. So instead of paying tens or hundreds of dollars to the pianist or some publisher, why can't we pay Mozart's heirs directly since they are more deserving than some random pianist/publisher?

-When a work is no longer "profitable", a corporation can destroy it. This deprives the public of culture.

I'm pretty sure, other distributors of the art do keep backup copies. If Facebook can save some stupid photo of some ordinary guy, I'm sure someone else can save a copy of the work of art.

-A corporation could pay off authors of successful works and extend copyright forever (it already exceeds a lifetime).

That's their choice to sell. But I'm sure once the artists are famous enough, they will retain rights to their works and buy the services offered by these corporations instead of selling them their works for a fixed price. You can already sell your music on iTunes and other digital stores for 70% cut of the revenue.

If you're so against copyright why don't you and people like you learn to draw, paint, sing, compose music, etc. Then you can create artistic works you can distribute for free to the public. That's better than whining on forums how other people are not offering their hard-earned stuff to you for free.

But did your artist paid for all inspirations from folk music and similar not copyrighted sources? Or do you believe that creativity can exist in vacuum? If you take something from society - you must return something.

Yes, I think places, things, people, events and other things critically responsible for the artistic work should be compensated somehow... perhaps a royalty percentage similar to how the artists themselves are paid. So if you're selling a great photo of a park, you owe the park owner royalty.

And how much do you think is fair to earn for hard job of writing one good song? Is it 1000$? 10000$? 1M? 100M? Unlimited? Music or any other intellectual "property" is not a thing you know. It is not a house.

How much hard work exerted is only a small part of the equation and should not be calculated on the amount of conscious effort involved since creative works also involve a difficult to calculate subconscious and unconscious effort. A large part of on song's value is how desirable it is to the public.

You can make a loss from making the song or make millions, there's no fixed value like a business. This is different from the communistic or wage slave mentality where there is little risk or capital to be lost but there is a limited, fixed salary for ones work. So, I would say, the maximum value you can derive from the song, just like the maximum value you can derive from a house unless you know of cases where landlords have donated their houses to charity after a certain fixed profit goal was achieved.

Getting what back? You spent 0 time, 0 money, 0 talent, 0 effort in creating the work. What exactly are you owed back, if you gave nothing in the first place?

The artist created the work so he owns it just like you own your body and mind, no one else does. You can pay some tiny amount for personal use of the work, but that's as far as your rights go.

Just because to AGREE to steal/seize someone's work after a set amount of time, does not absolve you from theft.

Something as basic as letters or words are not copyrightable. It would be the equivalent of a infinite patent on the wheel -- that is, make the life of people inventing products based on wheels, a hell. Copyrighted works, on the other hand, don't prevent anyone from creating their own works. Copyright just ensures the current owner gets paid based on how much the work is selling.

As far as copyright on the glyphs for the letter font goes, the consumer or manufacturer who uses them, pays or has to pay for their use. I'm sure Microsoft and Apple license the various fonts included in their respective OSes.

Walt Disney isn't creating any new art since he died.

So? There are many descendents of people who owned real estate, farms, businesses, hotels and restaurants that are enjoying the fruits of their parents' hard work and investments. How about forcing these descendents to donate their parents' assets to the public domain, just like copyrighted works?

Legal laws are based on fairness, equality and yes, ethics. So let's have the ethical reason then.

In the event that it's not, you do realize how stupid, ignorant, and deluded you are, right? The text of the constitution that authorizes copyright reads:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

And you are an immoral, greedy little freeloader.

Those fine sounding noble words in the constitution don't match reality. If a copyright holder want protection (copyright or patent), he has to spend thousands to millions of dollars in legal expenses. Patents require anywhere from $10K to $90K just to get a patent approved, patent maintenance fees are extra. How about the public share a part of the expense in getting these patents? How about the public share expenses in training people who create copyrighted works and also finance the cost involved in creating the copyrighted works? No? I thought so.

You want someone else to do all the work and take the risk for you while you sit back and consume their works like mini-feudal lords.

And why was the phrase "Limited Times" used there? When a law is written, it should have a rational reason backing it. There is no rational reason "limited times" was used instead of "indefinite duration" other than to maliciously limit the amount of wealth that can be earned by the family of the copyright holder and his/her descendants.

Sorry bub, I don't know the other poster. Copyright seems to be like the "grave robber's code: once a wealthy person passes away, we're gonna take all his treasure and distribute it amongst overselves." Give me one good reason why you ethically deserve to get the copyrighted work for free?

Exclusive right to a work is not a god given right

It may not be god-given, but it should be the ethical and legal right. You paid exactly squat for the talent of the artist, his training and the hard work that went into creating his/her copyrighted works. So why should you get it for free, since it's unlikely you will spend 1 dollar on a copyrighted work that does not satisfy your needs or profit you in some way?

Don't you have a legal government provided right to be safe from physical harm by malicious people, to have protection from thieves who would happily steal your money and property? You do. Well, this is the same exact right that should be provided to artists (from pirates and the freeloading, anti-copyright masses).

My point, it's not a favor provided by the government. It's more like their duty to protect their copyright-holding citizens.

it's given by society as incentive to create something new.

Most artists will create new works even after they're financially successful. The decision to limit profits is ultimately due to evil and greed of the consumers.

Hundreds of cartoon characters were created in the early and mid 1900s. Only a few became successful and one of them was Mickey. Why should Disney make that asset available free to the public because the luck, creative and technical skills in pulling off a creative masterpiece is a lot? Why do creators of copyrighted work owe free stuff to the public? Do members of the public mail at least one dollar bill per year to failed artists? No. But artists are supposed to be charitable to the public somehow.

So end this scam called limited times for copyrighted work. Disney and M. Mouse were valuable a few decades ago, are valuable today and will remain valuable a 100 years from today.

Maybe he wasn't familiar with computers or GUI computers. Whether it's command line, GUI or programming languages, communicating with computers still requires learning a language which non-computer users don't know.

Seriously?!? A trained rocket scientist couldn't open a word processor?

Rocket science has nothing to do with GUI interfaces. How would this scientist go about launching the word processor? Explore many paths by clicking on random things?

It's not just a button, but a button that shows a hierarchy of programs. That's new, and innovative and useful to a lot of non-computer users (i.e. users who had not used DOS or computers before).