Copying Is Not Theft

There are reasonable arguments for limited applications of copyright. For example, an author writes a a really good novel and chooses to sell their work. In order to cover costs and make a modest profit from the book to live off of, they price the book at $5.00 a copy (fairly inexpensive for a paper copy). However, without any form of copyright, some jerk-off with access to that book and a scanner who just wants to make a quick buck on the side can afford to sell it for much less, say $3.00 a copy, and profits off of another’s hard work where the most they had to put forth was $5.00 for a copy of the book (assuming they didn’t just borrow a copy) and whatever printing costs they incur and end up profiting more (due to volume) than the author who likely spent several months on that work.

The problem with copyright law today is that the copyright laws are anything *but* limited. The Copyright act of 1790 allowed for a term of “fourteen years from the time of recording the title thereof”. I’d say, given current communication technology,  that 10 years is a more than good enough a period for guaranteeing copyrights to an author or authors. It’s more than long enough to provide them a reasonable period to realize a return on the personal investment in their creation while not overly-depriving the general public a free access to the work. Heck, I’ll even be generous and allow 5 year extensions if the party that held the copyright can prove they would be unduly harmed if the work entered the public domain. However, with each successive application of an extension, the levels that qualified “undue harm” would markedly (perhaps exponentially) increase such that few (if any) works would stay copyrighted longer than a generation or two and society could not be denied free access to that work without some extreme and extenuating circumstances.