When the printing press was invented, books and stories were taken from one publisher, copied and printed by another. This led to competition where the winner was the consumer, who finally had access to books at an affordable price. As a result of the printing press and this sort of “print mania,” literacy rates improved across the developed world and generations of readers honed the craft. As it goes with new inventions, the government got involved and mandated that every book that was published had to go through government approval; this was the invention of copyright.
Initially, copyright was pitched to writers and publishers as a good thing; you owned what you had made and had exclusive monopoly over it for fourteen years, with the option to extend it by another fourteen. You’ll often see people say that having this exclusivity encourages innovation, as you know that your product won’t be recreated. This was extended, and now the person who has written a story will have exclusivity for their entire life, plus seventy years after the fact! Rather than encouraging innovation, it is strangling potential.
When I was younger, I wanted to write my own story about Star Wars. I loved the universe it was set in and had so many ideas for stories that could unfold. As I fervently wrote my story, a teacher explained that I couldn’t get it published, no matter how hard I tried, due to copyright. Frustrated, I decided to find out which characters I liked were public domain and found that the original “Tarzan” books had long been available to the public.
The excitement faded as I found out that the term “Tarzan” is trademarked indefinitely by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ estate, and they love to sue people who try to make use of their character who is in the public domain. They’re willing to sell the trademark to companies like Disney, but are otherwise very restrictive on any use of the name. That unfortunately means individual creatives who don’t have connections to a large corporation are unable to legally provide a different take on these characters.
Someone else once had a similar idea of taking public domain characters and recreating them; his name was Walt Disney. During the mid-1900s, classics like “Alice in Wonderland,” “Snow White,” “Pinocchio” and many more were made by the Disney Corporation, cementing their legacy for generations.
If you were to ask most kids about “Rapunzel,” they’d be able to tell you about it because of the Disney story, but ask most kids about John Carter — another character held hostage by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ estate — and they’ll be left scratching their heads. Not allowing stories to be revisited sends them to the graveyard of irrelevancy.
Some libertarians might say that the concept of copyright fits into the philosophy well, since you have ownership of your property. I would have to disagree entirely. In the case of property such as land, you have an inherent scarcity that creates a need for one to own it.
In the case of intellectual property, I would like to see governmental monopolies ended so as to allow potential creators to build on top of properties that have no concept of scarcity. People would be willing to write and create without having copyright that lasts their lifetime plus seventy years, and we know that because people still wrote books even after the printing press made copying their works or building upon them inevitable.
