Copyrights, patents, trademarks have become contentious issues in a modern, increasingly digitized world. Copyright first became an issue with the invention of the movable type printing press. Previously, it was a non-issue because of the slow speed of manually copying a book and the lack of literacy amongst the general population. The printing press changed the equation by drastically reducing the cost of and time taken to copy a book. It also resulted in a gradual increase in literacy as people started seeing the advantages of being able to read. A good history of copyright can be found at the Copyright History website and also at Wikipedia.
Copyrights were originally seen as an incentive for creative artists. The idea was that they would have a limited time in which they could exploit their created work for commercial gain after which the work would be available in the public domain for anyone to do with it as they please. Copyrights and patents thus served a dual purpose. They were an incentive for creative people to be creative and to create new works and products. The second purpose was that once the work went out of copyright or patent protection into the public domain, the nation's cultural heritage would be enriched and succeeding generations would have a richer, more diverse heritage to build upon. Many of the cultural icons in most societies, specially Western ones, are as such because the original work either went out of copyright or the copyright holder did not strictly enforce his rights. Not just the local culture, but also the global culture is thus richer as a result.
The situation today is different. The value of enforcing copyrights and patents has increased dramatically. Not only that, but copyrights are increasingly being held by organizations and not by individuals. What is good for the organization is not necessarily good for the culture as a whole. What makes the matter worse is that copyright (and patent) enforcement frequently results in increased charges to the end consumer. When payments are tried to be collected globally, the product usually goes out of the reach of most consumers in developing countries who do not have the financial power of consumers in the developed countries. Sometimes, these attempts at rent collection results in consumers being left physically worse than before.
I'll give an example here. The example is the patents held by Western pharmaceutical companies on existing AIDS medication. While these medicines do not cure the disease, they do enable AIDS sufferers to lead relatively long, productive lives. These medicines are also priced at a level that Western consumers can (barely) pay. As a result, nearly the entire developing world cannot afford to buy them. Even governments in developing countries cannot afford to these medications due to their high cost. Millions of people are thus left to suffer a significantly lower quality of life. When developing world governments in desperation turned towards generic medicines, the Western pharmaceutical companies tried to prevent them from doing so backed by the full might of their national government (specifically the US). It was only a global and specially Western public backlash that forced these companies to back down. Their counter-offer was to reduce the price of these drugs by 90%. Unfortunately, the price was still significantly higher than the price being offered by generic manufacturers. What galls people in the developing world is that when the developed nations have what they perceive as a crisis, they suspend the rules for themselves that they impose on less powerful nations. When the US was faced with the possibility of the Swine Flu spreading dramatically, they threatened to break the patent of the manufacturer of the only drug, Tamiflu, that was effective against this disease. Previously, when a developing country had threatened to break the AIDS patent, the US government had weighed in on the issue in support of the patent holder. The life of a person in the developing world is not worth the same as the life of a person in the developed world. This is seen as rank hypocrisy in the rest of the world. One rule for the developed nations and another for the rest of the world.
Today the original intention of copyrights and patents has been hijacked. This has been done due to their increasingly lucrative nature. Since organizations hold most copyrights and patents, they have an incentive to have the time under protection extended to the maximum possible extent. That is why in the US, the period of copyright protection has increased over time till now it is over 100 years. The question is why should any organization or person be allowed to enjoy this protection for so long.
A case for extended copyright protection can be made for individuals - specially in cases where one work or a small number of works account for the bulk of an individual's creative output. If a songwriter has a single hit in his/her lifetime, then there is a strong case that he/she should enjoy copyright protection for the duration of his/her life. However, should this protection be enjoyed by the children? Why? Ofcourse a case for this also can be made. After all, children do inherit property and enjoy the benefits thereof even though they may have done nothing personally to obtain the property. But then the question in this case becomes should copyrights and patents be treated in the same fashion as say land is? If yes, then no creative work will come into the public domain and cultural heritage will be significantly poorer as a result. So a strong argument can be made that copyrights should be limited in time to the life of an individual.
What about organizations? Unlike a person, the potential lifespan of an organization is unlimited. Should a copyright or patent held by an organization then be under protection for the lifespan of the organization? Effectively this is what organizations are aiming for when they push for extensions of copyright and patent protection. In some cases, the costs to society are viewed as being so great that this effort is resisted. Thus patent protection for medicines is allowed to expire after a set period of time because this is seen as a net benefit to society as a whole. In other cases, the issue is not so clear cut. Take the case of the operating system OS/2 which is owned by IBM. The company has stopped selling this software and seemingly has no plans to re-introduce it. This is seen by their efforts to move existing customers of OS/2 to other operating system. In such a case, should IBM be forced to move OS/2 into the public domain? If OS/2 is moved into the public domain (and in this case moving into the public domain means putting the source code into the public domain), then either other people will start tinkering with it or they will ignore it. However, this will be a choice exercised by society. In the current scenario, this choice cannot be exercised because IBM refuses to allow other people to tinker with OS/2 thereby behaving rather like the proverbial dog in the manger. If other people are allowed to tinker with it, then who knows, they may produce something superior to current offerings. This did happen in the browser market. After Netscape collapsed, some enthusiasts got together and started developing Firefox based on Netscape. In the process, they re-ignited developments in the browser market which had stagnated as a result of the virtual monopoly exercised by Internet Explorer.
On the whole, I feel that there is a strong societal benefit having strictly temporary copyright and patent protections. The term should be long enough to give the original owner reasonable time to enjoy the benefits of his/her creation. Afterwords, the work should be moved into the public domain. The term of protection shoudl vary with the industry. To give examples, pharmaceutical companies need a relatively long time frame because of a long testing phase and an almost equally long regulatory process. Creative works like books, songs, articles etc. should enjoy protection for the lifetime of the original creator but no longer. The benefit to society outweighs the benefits that would accrue to the children. For software, protection should be afforded for a fairly limited period like say 10 years or as long as the product is commercially available whichever is shorter. Generally, a piece of software is no longer commercially available within 5 years of its introduction. Even if the software is made available, its undergoes frequent revisions and later versions bear next to no resemblance to the original version. The point is that a reasonable balance needs to be struck between private interests and societal interests.
Copyrights were originally seen as an incentive for creative artists. The idea was that they would have a limited time in which they could exploit their created work for commercial gain after which the work would be available in the public domain for anyone to do with it as they please. Copyrights and patents thus served a dual purpose. They were an incentive for creative people to be creative and to create new works and products. The second purpose was that once the work went out of copyright or patent protection into the public domain, the nation's cultural heritage would be enriched and succeeding generations would have a richer, more diverse heritage to build upon. Many of the cultural icons in most societies, specially Western ones, are as such because the original work either went out of copyright or the copyright holder did not strictly enforce his rights. Not just the local culture, but also the global culture is thus richer as a result.
The situation today is different. The value of enforcing copyrights and patents has increased dramatically. Not only that, but copyrights are increasingly being held by organizations and not by individuals. What is good for the organization is not necessarily good for the culture as a whole. What makes the matter worse is that copyright (and patent) enforcement frequently results in increased charges to the end consumer. When payments are tried to be collected globally, the product usually goes out of the reach of most consumers in developing countries who do not have the financial power of consumers in the developed countries. Sometimes, these attempts at rent collection results in consumers being left physically worse than before.
I'll give an example here. The example is the patents held by Western pharmaceutical companies on existing AIDS medication. While these medicines do not cure the disease, they do enable AIDS sufferers to lead relatively long, productive lives. These medicines are also priced at a level that Western consumers can (barely) pay. As a result, nearly the entire developing world cannot afford to buy them. Even governments in developing countries cannot afford to these medications due to their high cost. Millions of people are thus left to suffer a significantly lower quality of life. When developing world governments in desperation turned towards generic medicines, the Western pharmaceutical companies tried to prevent them from doing so backed by the full might of their national government (specifically the US). It was only a global and specially Western public backlash that forced these companies to back down. Their counter-offer was to reduce the price of these drugs by 90%. Unfortunately, the price was still significantly higher than the price being offered by generic manufacturers. What galls people in the developing world is that when the developed nations have what they perceive as a crisis, they suspend the rules for themselves that they impose on less powerful nations. When the US was faced with the possibility of the Swine Flu spreading dramatically, they threatened to break the patent of the manufacturer of the only drug, Tamiflu, that was effective against this disease. Previously, when a developing country had threatened to break the AIDS patent, the US government had weighed in on the issue in support of the patent holder. The life of a person in the developing world is not worth the same as the life of a person in the developed world. This is seen as rank hypocrisy in the rest of the world. One rule for the developed nations and another for the rest of the world.
Today the original intention of copyrights and patents has been hijacked. This has been done due to their increasingly lucrative nature. Since organizations hold most copyrights and patents, they have an incentive to have the time under protection extended to the maximum possible extent. That is why in the US, the period of copyright protection has increased over time till now it is over 100 years. The question is why should any organization or person be allowed to enjoy this protection for so long.
A case for extended copyright protection can be made for individuals - specially in cases where one work or a small number of works account for the bulk of an individual's creative output. If a songwriter has a single hit in his/her lifetime, then there is a strong case that he/she should enjoy copyright protection for the duration of his/her life. However, should this protection be enjoyed by the children? Why? Ofcourse a case for this also can be made. After all, children do inherit property and enjoy the benefits thereof even though they may have done nothing personally to obtain the property. But then the question in this case becomes should copyrights and patents be treated in the same fashion as say land is? If yes, then no creative work will come into the public domain and cultural heritage will be significantly poorer as a result. So a strong argument can be made that copyrights should be limited in time to the life of an individual.
What about organizations? Unlike a person, the potential lifespan of an organization is unlimited. Should a copyright or patent held by an organization then be under protection for the lifespan of the organization? Effectively this is what organizations are aiming for when they push for extensions of copyright and patent protection. In some cases, the costs to society are viewed as being so great that this effort is resisted. Thus patent protection for medicines is allowed to expire after a set period of time because this is seen as a net benefit to society as a whole. In other cases, the issue is not so clear cut. Take the case of the operating system OS/2 which is owned by IBM. The company has stopped selling this software and seemingly has no plans to re-introduce it. This is seen by their efforts to move existing customers of OS/2 to other operating system. In such a case, should IBM be forced to move OS/2 into the public domain? If OS/2 is moved into the public domain (and in this case moving into the public domain means putting the source code into the public domain), then either other people will start tinkering with it or they will ignore it. However, this will be a choice exercised by society. In the current scenario, this choice cannot be exercised because IBM refuses to allow other people to tinker with OS/2 thereby behaving rather like the proverbial dog in the manger. If other people are allowed to tinker with it, then who knows, they may produce something superior to current offerings. This did happen in the browser market. After Netscape collapsed, some enthusiasts got together and started developing Firefox based on Netscape. In the process, they re-ignited developments in the browser market which had stagnated as a result of the virtual monopoly exercised by Internet Explorer.
On the whole, I feel that there is a strong societal benefit having strictly temporary copyright and patent protections. The term should be long enough to give the original owner reasonable time to enjoy the benefits of his/her creation. Afterwords, the work should be moved into the public domain. The term of protection shoudl vary with the industry. To give examples, pharmaceutical companies need a relatively long time frame because of a long testing phase and an almost equally long regulatory process. Creative works like books, songs, articles etc. should enjoy protection for the lifetime of the original creator but no longer. The benefit to society outweighs the benefits that would accrue to the children. For software, protection should be afforded for a fairly limited period like say 10 years or as long as the product is commercially available whichever is shorter. Generally, a piece of software is no longer commercially available within 5 years of its introduction. Even if the software is made available, its undergoes frequent revisions and later versions bear next to no resemblance to the original version. The point is that a reasonable balance needs to be struck between private interests and societal interests.
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