The Financial Times is running an interesting editorial about the state of American (and, with the enactment of the United States Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act 2004 (Cth), Australian) copyright law. Professor Boyle argues (rightly, I think) that current intellectual property protections go beyond what is necessary to promote innovation:

Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.

Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.

While this is true, it cannot be denied that some strengthening of copyright protections over the course of the twentieth century was desirable. As an increasingly valuable yet — at least when compared with corporeal hereditaments — vulnerable resource, some intellectual property assets do need additional legal recognition. The keyword here, however, is ‘some’. Prior to the introduction of automatic extensions at the behest of everyone’s favourite rodent, the vast majority of IP assets weren’t renewed. This suggests that, not only are current copyright terms too long, they’re also unnecessary in the vast majority of cases. An optional registration and extension system is one solution.

See further: Professor James Boyle, Deconstructing Stupidity