>I hear this "We have a crappy implementation of it, but copyright is
>good in principle" idea often, but I'm not sure I know which principle
>is being talked about.
>
>What is this principle? Can we name it?
I'm definitely in the camp of "we have a crappy implementation of it",
I think the current "life plus 70 years" law is not only ridiculous
but blatantly driven by Disney, and extremely detrimental. But, I
absolutely think that there's some sense of copyright that we all
want, and this is the story I always tell to illustrate that.
In music school, we often ran across works that were believed to be by
Franz Joseph Haydn, but whose authorship was eventually called into
question by music historians. At some point, one of my profs told a
story that Haydn's publisher would sometimes take pieces written by
other composers and publish them under Haydn's name. Haydn was quite
well known and well liked, so naturally his publisher thought that the
pieces would sell better if marketed as pieces by him. I suspect he
was correct about that.
I can't assure you that this story is true, but it kind of doesn't
matter in this sense: If it's true, it's repulsive. I've told a lot
of people this story in casual settings and I can't remember anyone
expressing sympathy with the publisher's position. We have an
intuitive sense, then, of intellectual property. It just clearly
doesn't even come close to matching our nation's intellectual property
laws.
david
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