One of my issues with copyrights and patents are setup is how arbitrary their length is. Copyrights lasts for your entire life + 70 years. A patent lasts for 20 years. That seems odd to me. The end result of billions of dollars worth of product development can be under protection for a shorter amount of time than some doodle you scribbled on a napkin one afternoon.
Ideally, the length of time a copyright or patent lasts should be tied to market behavior by producers. I’m not sure how’d you make this work, but as a starting point, the market value of a copyrights or patent should correspond roughly to your sunk costs in producing the relevant intellectual property. One you account for those, I feel the law shouldn’t offer any additional protection. You are of course, entitled to try to earn a profit, but your profits should come not from a monopoly but from making a better product than your competitors — and I mean competitors in a very narrow sense. For example, I’d like to choose between book publishers based on factors like the quality of the paper or which ones offer digital copies, as opposed to which one of them managed to snag the exclusive rights to a book first.
I really can’t justify sunk costs as a barometer of the ideal value of a copyright over say, sunk costs + 20%, but it seems to jive from from the standpoint of putting the original content producer on a level playing field with the copycats. If anyone has thoughts on this, I’d be interested in hearing them.
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