To paraphrase the Bard: "To Limit, or Not to Limit, That is the Question."

If copyright were forever, I couldn't have just done that. Or at very least, doing that, I'd risk getting sued. Yet in the New York Times, Mark Helprin tries to make us think that copyright should live forever; that 500 years or more from now, someone looking to republish, or rewrite, or simply print and hand a copy of, say, a Hardy Boys novel should need to go get permission.

Helprin tries to equate this to property rights. I'll just quote him here, lest I be accused of twisting his words:

Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.

That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren.

Where he goes wrong is that copyright is not a physical object, or a business entity. If (for the sake of argument) you were to build a business on selling books, for right or wrong, you will eventually need new books to sell. A business that sells widgets must produce a new widget for each customer, and theoretically must periodically re-work and update their product. A house maintains "ownership", but if your heirs don't pay their property taxes or the government exercises its right of Eminent Domain, it will be taken away from them.

Copyright is not a physical object, nor a business entity. It is instead like the other system that operates, as Helprin quotes, "for limited Times". That other system is patent, and patent and copyright are very similar to each other.

The patent system is based upon a simple premise: that an invention is valuable, but that the value does not come solely from its maker, but from what the maker draws from society and the public domain. No invention is crafted simply by itself; the inventor has the input of previous inventors, be they of the wheel, or fire, or TNT, or smokeless gunpowder, or the process to extract propane from crude oil, or to extrude silicon into a form upon which a computer chip can be printed. In short, no matter what invention may be patented, it is not created alone, but rather built upon the building blocks of inventions that have passed previously to the public commons. It therefore makes sense that, after a certain period of time, any new invention should then be "paid back" to the commons, in order to encourage future inventors to improve upon it or add to it, or use it in a new and creative way that will itself be patentable and of improvement to society.

Helprin, of course, has a stake in this. As a writer, he wants to hold onto what he calls 'his", blind to the contribution and presence of the now-publicly-available work of others that is inevitably a part of his own. Philosophers and Doctorates of literature will tell you that there are only 6 archetypal stories, and that any more "complex' stories can always be reduced and analyzed to find that these six archetypes are merely inserted or overlaid upon each other.

Nowhere is this truer than in the "storytelling juggernaut" of the 20th century, the behemoth known as Disney. Take a look at the works of Disney, and what will you find? The vast majority of their stories are shamelessly culled from the public domain, appropriated, twisted a bit, and sold out - and yet the Disney corporation claims copyright over these, and even has been known to file frivolous lawsuits against other companies that produced material based on the same publicly-available stories. Sleeping Beauty, The Sword and the Stone, Pocahontas, pretty much the whole library of Disney works from the very beginning (Steamboat Willie's music comes from various then-public-domain sources such as the folk tune Turkey in the Straw).

Copyrighted and patented ideas are drawn from the public pool. It is in repayment of this debt to the public pool that they must necessarily be returned, so that others can improve and change them to bring new ideas to the next generation. That copyright has been extended to obscene extremes - at the behest of juggernauts like Disney that could afford to shamelessly bribe legislators - is a terrible loss to all of society.