Forever And Ever, Amen
A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright? - New York Times
Who's this Mark Helprin twit anyway? I've a sneaking suspicion he's the grandchild of someone who had an idea of consequence some decades ago.
Intellectual property is an utterly nebulous concept--you might as well own the air as own a song, a novel, an idea. Copyright exists solely in recognition of the fact that people have no motivation to innovate if they can't claim some reward themselves.
Their grandkids, and their grandkids' corporations? Fuck 'em up the ass. It's disgraceful that copyright extends beyond the lifespan of the holder at all, and Halprin should be ashamed of himself for suggesting that people should profit indefinitely from the work of their forebears whatever the cost to the worlds of art and science.
Edit: I knew I knew that name--he's the horse's ass who used to give the GOP big sloppy blowjobs in The Note. No he's not. Shame on me for getting my info through Metafilter.
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I recommending consistently spelling the writer's name correctly, first off.
And you didn't need to go any further than the Times piece to identify the author:
Mark Helprin, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, ?Winter?s Tale.?
As always... OY!
Dude--not a journalist here. I could give two shits who Mark Helprin actually is; my baseless speculation was all I cared about. I do regret the Helprin/Halperin mixup, though, because I *do* know who the latter is and should have realized it sooner.
Mike, I totally agree that copyrights should not extends beyond the lifespan of the holder. It's in keeping with the principle of the so called "death tax", which I also support, regardless of what you want to call it.
The utterly American point is that there should be obstacles to handing down wealth from generation to generation because that allows rich families to get richer and richer, and eventually we go back to the bad old days of medieval Europe where the disparities between rich and poor are so great, no poor person could overcome them.
I'll call it the Paris Hilton rule: make the kids of rich people work as hard as their parents did to earn wealth.