Should Copyright Live Forever?

Mark Helprin argues in an op-ed in the New York Times that copyright provisions should be extended again. I think he's wrong. He thinks the government takes away what it gives. It does and for a reason. He highlights the constitutional points that give Congress the power to grant copyright's for a limited time, but cleverly leaves out the rest of the story, unfortunately like anyone who wants to amend the constitution for whatever reason. (I'm not against amending the constitution on principle and believe that the amendment provisions are there for a reason.) He leaves out the clause, "promote the general welfare" which most constitutional scholars have taken to mean that Congress' original intent was indeed to limit the protections of copyright.

Well, he doesn't quite leave it out. He twists it disingenuously around a bit by saying Congress once said that it was for the public good to promote slavery.

Give me a break.

He then tosses this in:

You can always make a case for the public interest if you are willing to exclude from common equity those whose rights you seek to abridge.

Please.

If you follow Helprin's reasoning about art and ideas to its logical conclusion and applied it an earlier time, Shakespeare would have been out of a career. So would the movie and television industry today. And as a matter of fact, so would writing op-eds.

More reading on this. And yet, even more.