On Copyrights

The US Constitution grants the Congress the power to enact laws to "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." (section 8). Note use of the word "limited". Once an author creates a work, getting paid repeatedly, indefinitely, for that work does not incent him to continue to author. If he can just take his one book (or song or invention or whatever) to the bank for the rest of his and his children's children's children's lives, what motive would he have to continue to produce?

Notice how science and art are both represented here. Consider what would happen if universities treated discoveries the same way the **IAs treated media. Research would be impossible. If no one was ever allowed to build on the research and findings of those coming before them without financially compensating hundreds of other scientists in the process, it would be too cost prohibitive to research anything, and we'd forever be living in the bronze age. Why should it be one way for science and another way for the arts?

Now Disney and the **IAs want copyrights and patents to be enforcable indefinitely, because they don't want to have to create something new (horrors!) which would supplant the revenues lost when their copyright protection sunsets. This does not promote or incentivize new creativity. To the contrary, it shuts the door on it.