Allowing an artist to control their own art for justice/purity/authenticity reasons is not the spirit of the law. The stated purpose of IP law is to incentivize useful things. Calvin & Hobbes is an example of the law being used contrary to its intended purpose.

> “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

Your definition of "progress" is telling.

Someone else's definition of progress could include a heightened respect for comic strips as art, rather than base fodder for merchandise and commercial exploitation. Watterson's stance did help with that, at a time (late '80s) when it was still a very niche position in the US.

And isn't what you're calling "merchandise and commercial exploitation" art too? Is a movie not art just because it's licensed?

With all due respect to Warhol and friends, IMHO a tin of soup is a tin of soup. A cereal box featuring C&H is something we can all live without.

This is particularly true for comics, which have historically been seen as fodder for other industries in the US and need all the attention they can get as an art-form in their own right.

It's not my definition "progress". It's what the word is understood to mean in this context. The text can mean anything if you take "progress" to mean "whatever makes the world better by my lights".

You are contradicting yourself. You're citing constitution as written when the "limited" was taken to mean something like 14 years. And in these times publications took forever to circulate, without trucks or interstate highways.

> In Congress’s first Copyright Act of 1790, as under the Statute of Anne, copyright persisted for 14 years, with the possibility of a 14-year renewal term.

> Under current law, copyright in a work created by an individual author lasts for the life of that author, plus an additional 70 years.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-...

Yeah, we should've been shortening terms as technology eased production/distribution rather than lengthening them. For patents too, though at least those didn't end up as outlandishly long as copyright.