Fred Benenson wrote: > The reason why depreciation won't work for creative works is > because they don't actually depreciate in physical value -- a song's > copyright is no less "useful" in its state 20 years after it's useful > than it is at the time of its creation. I suppose there's an argument > for notion that copyrights dilute over time as a matter of fashion and > taste (while most ragtime is copyrighted, much fewer of those works are > as valuable as they were at the time of their creation due to the > popular taste of music consumers -- apologies to any ragtime fans on > this list) this seems a odd and difficult factor for the law to account > for.
"Intellectual Property" does not cover the physical value of work, it covers the value of copying the work. Copyright accounts for deprecation. After (e.g.) 70 years the exclusive value of any work covered by copyright will deprecate 100% in a single step. The binary nature of copyright value deprecation fosters the illusion that IP doesn't depreciate in value whilst under copyright, and so we see copyright extension and the assumption that copying any copyrighted work destroys its non-deprecating value. Studies show that this value is in fact usually exhausted within just 20 years. So the "Intellectual Property" covered by copyright usually deprecates at the rate of 5% a year (probably in more of a curve, but you get the idea). None of this accounts for copyrights that increase in value, or for works that only become economically valuable once out of copyright (e.g. "It's A Wonderful Life"). But owning the servers -uh- masters shouldn't be underrated. Deprecation is an interesting and possibly useful idea for tackling the distortions of IP extremism, although it does concede that IP is a form of property. - Rob. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
