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Ross Douthat mediates between Mark Helprin, who wants copyrights extended, and Lawrence Lessig, who wants to remake the current system.
Helprin is persuasive when he argues that copyright's disappearance would be a slow-motion disaster, and plausible when he argues that the direct costs of letting his descendants continue to profit from sales of "A Soldier of the Great War" are minor or even nonexistent. But Lessig and company are equally plausible when they suggest that the copyright laws that protect the Helprin family's intellectual property can be misused, usually by lawyered-up corporations, to block the kind of creative borrowing and reworking that early generations of artists took for granted.
Why not, then, simultaneously extend copyright and narrow its scope? Let the Helprins continue to earn royalties into the distant future, but let adaptations, derivations, parodies and borrowing flower more quickly and completely than the current system allows. Leave the Tolkiens the rights to "The Hobbit" in perpetuity, but not the right to prevent two enterprising film companies from going forward with competing adaptations. Leave the Mitchells the rights to "Gone With the Wind," but not the right to tie up a would-be parodist in court for years on end because they don't like what she's doing to their Scarlett. Leave the Lucas family the right to "Stars Wars," but not the right to prevent me from writing my own competing version of Anakin Skywalker's life story.
Maybe this sort of system would turn out to be impractical. But it's only one of the many bridges one could imagine between a principled defense of artistic property rights and a principled defense of artistic freedom.I wouldn't mind more mixing of The Beatles and Jay Z.
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