rc3.org

Richard Posner, one of the intellectual luminaries of the right, gave a lecture criticizing copyright extension and other intellectual property chicanery. I’d like to think that the value of the public domain is something everybody could agree on. As Posner says, intellectual property is both input and output for the IP industry. The companies that are trying to extend copyrights and destroy the pubic domain are the same ones that have repurposed material already in the public domain repeatedly and turned it into millions of dollars. Or do people really think that Pinocchio, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin are all stories that originated at Disney’s studios?