Writing in the New York Times, Mark Helprin says he thinks an injustice is being done to creators of artistic and literary works, because the copyright that protects them doesn’t last forever — unlike the laws that protect, say, ownership of physical property. If the government can’t simply take a person’s house once it is paid for (which it can, of course, but let’s leave that aside for the moment) then why can it take a man’s intellectual property?
As mellifluous as Helprin’s writing may be, his argument on the topic — if one can even call it that — is as clanky and tone-deaf as any I’ve seen. At one point he writes that:
“Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren”
and then asks why
“such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart” and why it is alright for the state to “sieze the property” of authors.
Like many others, Helprin has likely been seduced by the term “intellectual property,” which implies that ideas are (or should be) the same as objects. Once you begin to think of your creations — the words you have strung together in a particular way at a particular time — as property in the same sense that your house and car are , then you are well on your way towards a misunderstanding.
Helprin may believe that investing artistic works with the same qualities as physical property is “natural and becoming,” but saying it doesn’t make it so. Early lawmakers decided to treat them differently for a reason — because they are different. Taking someone’s property removes it from him forever. Copying someone’s artistic creation, or using it to create something artistic in its own right, is something quite different.
I could go on, but as BoingBoing notes, Lawrence Lessig has set up a wiki to craft a response to Helprin here, and there is already more than enough rational argument there to counter the author’s position and then some.
