Reporter Sues YouTube Over Copyrights

@ the "walking all over people's work." That implies that works authors somehow have an intrinsic right to control what people do with their works. Thing is, they don't. We can argue the philosophical points until the cows come home, so lets stick with the legal points and the constitutional points. Article 1, Section 8 states (in part) that Congress has the power "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries." In 1790, Congress passed a law that gave just a 14-year copyright term, with a possible 14-year extension. They also required that the copyrights be registered. So lets recap:

A. Framers of the Constitution thought people should be able to "walk all over people's work" after 14/28 years.

B. Framers only even granted that exclusive right if the works author registered the copyright.

That's an awful lot of defiling of work that was "taped at quite an expense of time and expertise." So why would the Framers of our constitution spit on our creative author's rights? My theory is (feel free to tell us yours) because they recognized that creative "property" shares absolutely nothing with physical property. In their ideal, ALL works would be freely distributable- but they knew that without the profit motive, important documents like scientific journals wouldn't be distributed widely enough. So, they made an exclusive right to that publishers would have an incentive to spread information far and wide. There is no "right" to exclusive control- merely a compromise by the Founding Fathers to aid in distribution.

Of course, with the Internet, the costs of distributing work have fallen to a trivial amount. One would think, then, that we could return to our founding fathers' ideal. That would be wonderful, except that in the intervening 200 years, people have forgotten that creative property is ideally freely distributed and instead now think that using people's works is "walking all over" said work, that things on TV aren't free and shouldn't be, and that copyright owners (like Tur) should be able to tell everyone else what they can and can't do with his work. That's not the way it should be.

If it's my book, I can tell you not to steal it or I'll prosecute. But if it's the WORDS within the book- why should I be able to tell you what you can and can't do with those thoughts and ideas, and words? Exclusive control is a fundamentally negative thing for society, and was only ever implemented to provide the profit motive for wide distribution of important works. Now that we don't need that profit motive- we shouldn't need the restrictions either.

The founding fathers had it right. Lets go back to their model.