Last weekend Mark Helprin published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that essentially argued that copyrights should exist in perpetuity. The essence of his argument is that if he writes something, his descendants for all time should be able to earn a living off of that. That’s kind of like saying that my current employer should continue paying my children and grandchildren and great grandchildren ad infinitum for the work I do now. This is an absurd argument on the face of it and Helprin comes across as a fool for even putting the idea forward. Today Techdirt has a wonderfully articulate rebuttal of Helprin’s idea starting from an explanation of the difference between physical and intellectual property.

The purpose of property is to better manage the allocation of scarce resources. Since the resource is limited and not everyone can have it, property rights and property law make complete sense for a civilized society, allowing those with rights to the property to buy, sell and exchange their property. This allows for resources to be efficiently allocated through commerce and the laws of supply and demand. It’s a sensible system for the best allocation of scarce resources. However, when it comes to infinite resources, there’s simply no need to worry about efficient allocation — since anyone can have a copy.

Perhaps what we need to do to make some progress in this whole discussion is to change the terminology to words that are more accurately represent what we are talking about. The whole term intellectual property should be discarded immediately in favor of Ideas. Once we are talking about Ideas the tone of the argument changes. When a company like HBO or Disney starts talking about getting a perpetual monopoly (and a copyright or patent is a government granted monopoly) on an Idea, it might start getting average people’s attention so that they stand up and say NO MORE! Check out the rest of Techdirt’s article here.