[Upd-discuss] Extract from Becker-Posner Blog

[Peter Eckersley]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 11:06:16AM +0000, James Davis wrote:
> William Landes
> and I, however, in our recent book "The Economic Structure of Intellectual
> Property Law," argue that there are two possible justifications for
> indefinitely long copyright terms: to prevent congestion (overuse of a
> copyrighted work might reduce its value to nothing), which is a
> traditional economic argument for property rights; and to induce
> investment in maintaining the value of the copyrighted work, for example
> by producing frequent revised editions (only the revisions could be
> copyrighted independently). 

This is the same argument that Orrin Hatch made in defense of the CTEA.  Of
course, this policy goal would be much better served by granting very brief,
very narrow monopolies to anybody who makes an "investment in maitaining the
value of the copyrighted work", regardless of whether they are the original
copyright owner or not.

-- 
Peter Eckersley
Department of Computer Science   &                  mailto:pde@cs.mu.oz.au 
IP Research Institute of Australia             http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~pde
The University of Melbourne