Copyright

It's been a few weeks since I've discussed some of my reading, but I did finish Mark Helprin's excellent book about the strong pull toward copyright reform (which is a scary threat to writers, musicians, movie producers, script writers, journalists, and anyone who creates anything with words, images, sounds, or data).

The book is entitled, Digital Barbarism, and Helprin speaks for all writers and artists everywhere in a compelling and artistic way. Currently, copyright law allows for a writer to own copyright to his or her work for the writer's lifetime, plus seventy years after one's death. This copyright law is vitally important for writers and artists who, through their hard labor, sacrifices, and valuable work, should have equal opportunity to provide for their children and grandchildren, just as any business owner, producer, or farmer has the opportunity to pass along their ownership to their children, etc.

Without copyright law, just as if there were no estate laws for heirs, eventually the state would own everything and we would no longer have a free enterprise economy, but a government-owned, government-backed, and government-producing economy. We may already be traveling there at light-speed.

Our founding fathers and mothers regarded copyright as so important that it is written into the U.S. Constitution. Let's keep it that way . . . and if anything, extend copyright law rather than shrink it.

God knows there's enough of me that is already shrinking. Writers, musicians, screenwriters, journalists, and actors don't need copyright stripped. The day that happens, it's the end of creativity. After all, who would produce a work without some promise of income from one's labors? Who would incur the cost of producing a movie, a play, a book, an article, or a song if any Joe off the street could then claim it, print it, produce it, copy it and then sell it as their own?

I may be old-fashioned, but that used to called theft.