A "property right" is an entitlement to government protection for that property. Society is willing to protect Manhattan indefinitely - it only takes a fixed number of police officers to do so. But protecting everyone's unlimited imagination indefinitely is impractical (as time went on the number of historical creative works increases, and people continue to own all the rights to them, so we get an ever-increasing number of lawsuits per new creative work), so we set some time-based cutoff (which is an imperfect approach, but we need some rule).

An utilitarian argument: Scarcity. Land ownership is inevitable - for you to build a house, someone else must give up on digging a well -, you can only transfer it, and there's no reason to assume the new owner (even if it's the State) will use it better and increase society's welfare.

Copyright over a work can be eliminated, granting everyone (including the original creator) the possibility of building on top of it without conflicts arising, so the total welfare is increased.

The reason we have land ownership is because without it, we have a tragedy of the commons situation: there is no incentive to improve the land, because anybody can just come along and harvest the corn you spent your hard work planting.

I don't get why people assume that creative works are any different. Creative works are scarce! We don't have an infinite number of creative people laboring to make new works. We actually have a pretty limited supply of such people, and creation is labor-intensive as well as not very scalable. You eliminate copyright, and you allow anyone to just come along and harvest the fruits of their labor, and you eliminate the incentive to engage in that labor.

The fanfiction phenomenon suggests otherwise; plenty of creative people are willing to spend a lot of time and effort on creative work even when they don't and can't own it.

My daughter loves drawing cartoons and comics. But she's not going to build something as ambitious as an entire graphic novel, because that would (a) turn her enjoyable hobby into work --- an often unpleasant expenditure of energy performed in the service of a long-term goal and (b) consume more time than she has available to her.

And so it is with fanfiction. The fanfiction process isn't going to generate _The Sound and the Fury_ or even _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_. At least, that isn't going to happen the way fanfiction is constituted now.

I respect any hobby that involves huge amounts of creative writing. But there's a difference between a hobby and a profession.

Meanwhile: if you don't believe that society benefits by having an economic framework wherein JK Rowling and Thomas Pynchon can dedicate all their productive hours to writing, and that instead we should do away with commercial publishing and switch entirely to the fruits of people's hours after they get home from their real jobs, you can have that. Today. Just don't read commercially published books. There is, as you point out, a lot of fanfiction out there, and a lot of it is probably quite good.

> The fanfiction process isn't going to generate _The Sound and the Fury_ or even _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_.

By which you mean what exactly? I'd say e.g. To The Stars is every bit the equal of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

> if you don't believe that society benefits by having an economic framework wherein JK Rowling and Thomas Pynchon can dedicate all their productive hours to writing, and that instead we should do away with commercial publishing and switch entirely to the fruits of people's hours after they get home from their real jobs, you can have that. Today. Just don't read commercially published books. There is, as you point out, a lot of fanfiction out there, and a lot of it is probably quite good.

Unfortunately, copyright means that every so often some of it gets taken down, and potential socially valuable services don't exist (e.g. I'd happily pay for bound copies of certain works, but because they were produced in violation of copyright that business doesn't exist). So while I will continue to read fanfiction, I will also continue to argue for a relaxation of copyright law.

We could always pay people (sign a contract) before the work is produced. Seems to work fine for the other 99.9% of professions.

Well, much in the way that the land we have today exists due to how it was shaped by history (1000 years ago, there probably wasn't a paved road and electric wires run to the plot of land you have now), no creative work exists in a bubble. If you're writing a story, you're building on generations of story tellers that came before you. As powerful and social creatures, there is nothing we can do that is not either directly or indirectly related to tons of other people's work. Nothing exists solely by virtue of your creativity, intellect, and effort.

If anything that argument supports making copyright stronger than other property rights. Even though my story, movie, or computer program builds on the past, it's still much more the result of my own effort than any land I own. I did very little of the work involved in stealing my back yard from Indians, clearing it, leveling it, running electricity, sewer, and water to it, etc.

> I did very little of the work involved in stealing my back yard from Indians, clearing it, leveling it, running electricity, sewer, and water to it, etc.

But you paid people for that, or paid other people who paid people for that, or so on. You don't pay the people who created the culture you participate in (I mean, you might buy a few specific works - but the common cultural language, standard symbolisms, the very notion of the structure of a novel...). How could you fairly pay for those? And if you were charged for every iota of culture you osmosed, how could that possibly be done justly, without making you suddenly liable for charges every time you had a casual conversation, or even walked out your door and looked around?