[Teever]

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

The purpose of the system as it was originally conceived was not to provide maximum economic extraction -- the purpose was to promote the progress of science and useful arts.

It is not necessarily the case that the maximization of economic extraction coincides with the progress of science and useful arts.

[ronsor]

I am familiar with the Copyright Clause. You need to remind the courts, Congress, and rights holders, not me. If I had my way, rent seeking would be dead.

[avazhi]

Interesting how you’ve chosen to interpret that section.

When I was in law school we were taught what seemed obvious then and is obvious now: that Congress has the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving authors and inventors exclusive right to the economic fruits of their works. You can argue about flaws in the system but it’s pretty laughable to suggest that copyrights and patents don’t exist for the purposes of maximum economic value extraction for inventors and authors.

There is quite literally no other reason for granting a copyright or patent. It’s also why if a plaintiff is successful in a claim for an infringement of either, he’ll get awarded money in the United States that at a bare minimum is designed to compensate him for the money he would have made if the patent or copyright had been complied with. Europe has some different ideas about moral rights in this space, but since you’re quoting US material I assume you aren’t referring to our funny brothers across the pond.

It’s obvious to most people that humans act in certain ways due to incentives, and we like to incentivise invention and creativity in the West.

[Teever]

Copyrights and patents don’t exist for the purposes of maximum economic value extraction for inventors and authors.

They exist to maximize the production of scientific and artistic works and do so by incentivizing creators with a limited exclusionary property right over the created work.

If the goal of this particular section were to maximize what authors and inventors can extract from their creations then explicitly assigning to them the property rights in perpetuity of said creations would have been the way to ensure that outcome.

Given that they specifically wrote "by securing for limited Times" it is entirely reasonable to make this interpretation and I'm not sure why you weren't taught this interpretation in law school -- it's a pretty settled thing and there have been many times that this subject has come up in US courts over the years.

And this isn't so whack if you stop and think about it. There are all kinds of limitations on intellectual property rights.

Like take trade secret protection for exampple -- it has no term limit and no disclosure requirement. If maximum extraction were the goal then patents would look like trade secrets. Instead the bargain that the patent system forces on creators requires them to publish their invention and then hands the rights to that invention to the public after a finite period of time. The system is explicitly designed to be less extractive compared to others on purpose.

And if copyright is built for maximum extraction why does it carve out an affirmative defense in the form of fair use for others to use copyrighted works without paying? Same with first sale, same with the idea/expression dichotomy -- so much of the antisocial contemporary intellectual property regime is configured around providing people free access to the use of intellectual property.

> There is quite literally no other reason for granting a copyright or patent.

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

It seems pretty clear to me from that sentence that the stated purpose of these laws was to drive the creation of science and art and that a limited time profit incentive being enshrined in law was merely a carrot to create an incentive for that.

The framers understood the complex interplay between property rights, freedoms, and incentives in driving innovation and creation.

Knowing that granting someone an exclusive right to something that isn't subject to finite physical limitations effectively denies everyone else in society that same right the framers still understood that it was necessary to abridge the freedoms of some to enrich society as a whole through the development of science and art.

In choosing to use the words "for limited times" the framers encoded the economic priority of the majority of society over the economic priority of the minority of creators into this section but they also did not give a specific time which to me speaks to their understanding of the complexity the interplay between all the factors and allowed for the possibility that they could change over time.

On damages: that's a non-sequitur. How a system enforces an entitlement once created tells you nothing about why it was created. Tort damages compensate plaintiffs but nobody woudl say that tort law exists to maximize plaintiff recovery.

It isn't in dispute that people respond to incentives. That's precisely why the size of the incentives and the configuration of the incentive structure matters and why we have things like term limits and fair use.

[avazhi]

> the goal of this particular section were to maximize what authors and inventors can extract from their creations then explicitly assigning to them the property rights in perpetuity of said creations would have been the way to ensure that outcome.

Actually it’s the opposite - both patents and copyrights expire after a period of time, which is the compromise we’ve reached between incentivising people to make money for themselves personally (giving them a legally protected right over their creations), and allowing wider society to benefit from inventions and scientific discovery. The fact that patents and copyrights do not exist in perpetuity points towards the idea that they exist to promote invention and scientific discovery in ways that can be commercially exploited but only for a limited time, usually by their creator or inventor (or his heirs under certain circumstances).

Not sure what else to tell you. This really isn’t that complicated or controversial, in the US at least.

[avazhi]

I'll come back to this - it's been awhile since I studied it and a cursory examination of my old notes has me spotting some misconceptions on my part as expressed here; at the very least I could have expressed myself better in both posts.