(2003-01-16) John Bloom Copyrights

John Bloom on Copy Right. The Founding Father-s wanted that term to be 14 years, with an additional 14 years if the author were still alive. After 28 years, they figured you'd had your chance to exploit your creation, and now it belonged to the nation at large. That way we would never end up with a system of hereditary privilege, similar to the printers guilds of Renaissance England, who tied up rights to dead authors and tightly controlled what could or could not be printed and who could or could not use literary material. In America, land of free ideas as well as free people, this would never happen, they said... Publishers are in the business of expanding capital. The writers who supply them are in the business of expanding Civilization itself.