Endlessly extending copyright

The European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, Charlie McCreevy, recently declared that copyright for performers be extended from 50 to 95 years. This was proposed, according McCreevy, to remedy a fundamental unfairness, wherein the composer (the author of a song) has rights that extend 70 years after his death, whereas the performer (the people actually playing the song) only have rights for 50 years.

This is rather twisted logic, as noted by Scott Vine, the Senior Information Office at UK-based Clifford Chance LLP, in his blog (found by way of this article on betanews):

How many times do we have to say this - copyright is NOT supposed to function as a pension. Have session musician’s often got royally screwed? Absolutely, but it is not copyright law's role to provide them with a pension. If they live in the UK and paid their taxes, they’ll have the state pension like everyone else. If they wanted more money, they could also have set up a personal pension - just like the rest of us.

Instead of increasing the performer's copyright period, why not REDUCE the composer's copyright period, asks Mr. Vine? No one seems to be asking whether or not such long copyright periods make much sense.

When is the proper time to declare that a created work is part of the common culture that all of us as human beings have right to access and use, for free, as often as we want? That applies to Dickens, Mozart, and Mark Twain. Why shouldn't the musical artists of the 50s be considered in the same category?

Let me be clear: I am a STRONG proponent of copyright. I believe the organizations like "The Pirate Bay" are as unethical and illegal as any real pirate that rode the high seas during the age of exploration. I think ownership of intellectual property is as important as ownership of physical property, and recognize that BOTH are the creation of laws. I have no more right to the car I own than anyone else. The legal system SAYS I own it, however, just as it says I own the copyright to any piece of software I independently create.

Intellectual property is, however, different than physical property. Ideas and expressions serve as grist for future creativity. As such, it is very important that they eventually become part of the common fabric of creativity.

That doesn't mean that tollbooths at the outset aren't important. America's founders considered the notion of intellectual property important enough to at least lay out the broad principle in the US constitution, even if they didn't feel it necessary to define the precise details. Article I, Section 8, 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.

Private physical property creates incentives to use that property in a productive and efficient manner by securing all gain derived from that property for the owner. Private intellectual property serves the same purpose, by ensuring that all financial gains resulting from someone's creativity accrues to the owner of the intellectual property. Some have noted that the incentive to create exists apart from financial incentives. Yes, they do, but financial incentives can inspire more to create (not everyone is willing to do it for free) even as it enhances the opportunity to express existing creativity (that is:  creativity that exists in the absence of financial incentives) by providing an income to the creator, enabling them to pursue what they love to do full time.

Ideas and expressions, however, are the foundation of new ideas, and so they must have limits. The balance can be tricky, but ask yourself whether a 20-year-old kid is incentivized by the notion that he will still be receiving royalties when he is 80 years old, or because his grandkids will still earn revenue long after he has passed away? That doesn't sound like what individual artists demand, so much as what companies with lifespans exceeding those of human being would prefer.

I bet there are a lot more programmers than musicians reading this blog. Why should programmers, whose role in software development parallels that of music performers, have less security? Why shouldn't I (as an example) not have a right to a royalty from each sale of software to which I contributed? Why is what I do any different? (NOTE: this is posed merely as a point of comparison, not as an advocacy of 95 years of royalty protection for programmers)

Though McCreevy is merely following a path blazed in the United States with respect to copyright periods, I wish someone would stop to ask whether or not a path that passes over Mount Everest makes much sense. Provide incentives, but don't make them endless.