fckm just expressed very elloquinly the tension inherent in copyright law. It sould be added that the founders were particularly uncomfortable with the idea of patents and copyrights.
Two quotes from Jefferson. You can skip these if it's too much but I think they're great:
Quote:
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The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitement to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limitied year, as of 14 years; but the benifit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of general supression [of monopolies].
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Here, Jefferson states the obvious: intelectual property is a monopoly. If you copyright a song, you can decide who gets to buy it, and at what price, with all the harmful economic effects that monopolies have. He agknowledges the opposing argument: that without monopolies people whould not produced new knowledge and grants that temporary monopolies may be a necessary evil to overcome this. Still he doubts their value. Implicit in his last statemnt is the idea that if you grant limited monopolies, they will eventually grow to unlimited monopolies, something that has been bourne out in fact.
Quote:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
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There are two key points. The first is that, as fckm stated, the consumption of intelectual property is nonrrivalrous, that you useing my intelectual property does not diminish your own ability to enjoy the intelectual property. Indeed, everyone can enjoy the same intelectual property at the same time, and this is a good thing because it ensures a limitless diversity of ideas for everyone.
The second is that Jefferson speaks of intelectual property not being property in nature, meaning in an ideal world. In the actual world the property part of intelectual property is a necessary evil, but should be viewed as just that, evil, and should be minimized whenever possible.
So the current state of copyright law is a farce. This doesn't mean that downloading is ok, since artists and comanies should have exclusive rights to a product for a limited time as an incentive to produce. But if copyright only lasted for a suitable ammount of time for this to happen, say five or ten years, I think most illegal downloading would stop. People who really didn't want to pay for something (and probably wouldn't anyway) would wait until it was legal, since that would be a reasonable amount of time not 95 years as under the current law.