In Germany and many other parts of the world, the origin of intellectual property rights was in what was considered to be an innate right of the author to control and benefit from the thing they created. In the US, on the other hand, it’s really always been about the right to make copies. In other words, distributor’s rights rather than author’s rights. The thing is, the longer copyright terms started in other countries, with the Berne Convention, which set a minimum term of 50 years after the author’s death. Until 1976, US copyright terms were only 28 years, renewable one time for another 28 years. The change in the US in 1976 was, in part, to get US Copyright law in step with the Berne Convention so we could join it, which we finally did in 1989. Then Disney stepped in and lengthened the term even longer than the minimum of the Berne Convention. I’m sure if they thought they could, Disney would lobby to make it perpetual. I do think there needs to be some way to allow people who create things to, for a reasonable amount of time, be able to profit from them. Otherwise, Disney could just make movies from any stories they wanted and not share any of the profits from those films with the original authors. I like the Creative Commons approach, but that’s still protection of intellectual property.
