Worst copyright idea ever

Mark Helprin wrote an op-ed in the New York Times essentially advocating that copyrights should last forever.

WHAT if, after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during your life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the government would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society ... to houses. Or to businesses.

That is, unless you own a copyright.

Leaving aside the legal ramifications of his proposal (the U.S. Constitution specifically states that copyrights can only be granted "for a limited time"), this is a horrible idea. Copyright is intended to encourage creativity. Allowing a creator sole control over is creation for a few years helps increase income for creators, and thus encourages creativity. Seventy years later, all it does is stifle creativity, by giving the heirs of the creator veto power over "derivative works". The supreme irony is that the huge corporations which keep lobbying for ever-increasing copyright terms, such as the Disney Corporation, have made their success largely on derivative works. Where would "The Little Mermaid" be if Andersen's heirs had total control over such works? What Shakespeare plays would ever be produced if his family demanded rapacious royalties for every performance?

In music, we benefit enormously from the public domain. Children would hardly ever be exposed to madrigals or Bach if it weren't possible to make simplified arrangements without going through a million legal hoops. "Sheep may safely graze" would never get played at weddings. The explosion of free-download sheet music sites such as CPDL is making more music more available than ever before, and cheapo reprints are increasingly available not only from reprints houses such as Dover and Kalmus but on CD from such publishers as Theodore Presser.

Copyright is a game played primarily among the big people. Big-name composers write works for big-name orchestras and opera companies, and fight to extract every penny from other such organizations. Do John Adams' operas get performed by schools or small-time opera companies. Rarely. Maybe they're just more difficult, but I think a lot of it is because such companies depend on slimming down pieces, making cuts, reducing the orchestra, and so on, and for a copyrighted work that requires hiring your attorney every time. The Elixir of Love presents no such problems. All of this is less evident in choral music, where there's no money to be had anyway. But how difficult is it to get arrangements of jazz standards? For a few titles, easy. For others, really tough because their copyright holders won't budge an inch. If those songs had gone into public domain after a "limited time" we'd have a huge volume of choices. There's absolutely no reason that the descendants of composers are entitled to benefit forever from their ancestor's creations.

Copyright terms are already too long. Patents are only good for 17 years, and their contribution to "creativity" is just as significant. Why the difference? It's just that the beneficiaries of patented inventions passing into the public domain are other big corporations and their lobbyists, whereas it's only people who benefit from public domain of books and music. Unfortunately, our government is run for the benefit of lobbyists, not people.