Re:Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Bi...
by crymer11 on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @10:37AM
(#3698601)
Agreed. Moreover, the benefit is not solely derived by the private party. Assuming that a portion of the revenue goes to lobbying, then already the benefit is for more than just the private party. This doesn't even account for any tax revenue generated by the copyrighted work.
Copyright is a [not so] limited-time state sponsored monopoly.
It is not rent-seeking.
Whilst copyright in the jurisdictions I know about is pretty much broken by over-extended time periods given to the monopoly rights holder at the [highly undemocratic IMO] detriment to the public domain it is nonetheless still given for creating new works. By definition copyright is granted on works that didn't exist before, new intellectual property has been created - how can this then be rent-seeking.
To recapitulate, using the Wikipedia definition thus (my emphasis):
"Rent [...] is obtained when a third party deprives one party of access to otherwise accessible transaction opportunities, making nominally "consensual" transactions a rent-collection opportunity for the third party."
Works would not be otherwise accessible if they were not first created.
I'll probably go along with a charge that extension of copyright terms (already granted) to the detriment of the public domain is rent-seeking behaviour however.