[snogglethorpe]

OTOH, the "happy birthday" song is really, really, simple and short (the text contains five words, and the music is only slightly more complex). It's valued not because of any inherent value, but because of its "cultural attachment" (a phrase I just made up, don't shoot me...), which the author has had nothing to do with.

Intuitively it seems like something that's extremely simple should have less of a government-granted monopoly than something that's extremely long and complex ("War and Peace").

Five years for something like this, maybe? That lets ditty-writers cash in on any fortuitous fads they manage to stumble into, but doesn't bog down our culture in molasses...

[nness]

I think this approach actually disregards the original purpose of copyrights. To judge its importance before it has the opportunity to realise any cultural impact would be a pretty biased approach; since word length, or duration, or simplicity of the music, doesn't necessary mean it won't have an impact, as "Happy Birthday" clearly shows.

[snogglethorpe]

But as I said, "cultural impact" in this case seems to really have little to with any inherent value in the song, and stems mostly from the actions of society rather than the song's author.

Why should the author reap the benefits, at the expense of society, when the author didn't actually contribute much?

[anigbrowl]

What a ridiculous argument. The author contributed the tune, It's a cheesy tune, but it's clearly enormously popular. You're basically arguing that if enough people like something they should just get it for free.

Now copyright terms are a separate issue, I think they should be substantially abridged. I'm just pointing out that society hasn't taken any action that could be construed as authorship.

[snogglethorpe]

> The author contributed the tune, It's a cheesy tune, but it's clearly enormously popular. You're basically arguing that if enough people like something they should just get it for free.

I'm saying that the reason why it's popular doesn't obviously have much to with the tune itself. Popularity is often pretty arbitrary.

This sort of intellectual property law is intended to (1) provide incentive for people to put the work into being creative, because that benefits society, and (2) satisfy intuitive notions of fairness (if somebody puts a great deal of effort into something, people feel that he "deserves" some reward from that).

For trivial works, neither (1) nor (2) is really justified: There's no significant effort to reward, society does not benefit significantly from it (because in such cases popularity does not stem from the work itself, any other work would have served just as well), and intuitive notions of fairness do not tend to consider great reward from little effort as justified.