Copyright Laws: Stifling creative minds in the United States for the past 150 years.

I once saw an episode of South Park, in which Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny were being sued by every single musician for copyright infringement.  This episode was created at around the same time that Napster, the big music sharing company at the time was being sued by the music company, spearheaded by one of my favorite drummers, Lars Ulrich of Metallica.  Now at the time I did not understand why sharing music was so bad, and even now, as my Iphone is full of music that I (gulp) found on music sharing websites.  Ladies and gentlemen they were suing Napster because their work is protected by the constitution and its copyright and patent clause.  Our founding fathers’ primary motivation for creating this clause was... “ to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and works.” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 in our United States Constitution).  In other words, under the copyright laws, your work was protected for 14 years and if you were still alive after the first 14 years passed, your work would continue to be protected for another 14 years.  Ideally, this is a great idea as it fosters creative competition and innovation, and brought us many of our inventions that we use today, and allowed to create better versions of what was originally invented.  However, the days in which these laws were meant to create growth have gone in the days of the VCR.  In this paper written by Derek S. Khanna, A Georgetown law graduate, he writes that “Current copyright law does not merely distort some markets- rather it destroys entire markets”.  Nowadays, it seems that you can’t do anything or share anything because you’re at risk of stepping on someone’s creative shoe.  The way that the copyright laws are interpreted in this generation in which we feel like we have to keep up with the Jones’ is actually hurting creativity and growth.  It’s a special type of corporate welfare (and one of the worst types) because the government protects certain businesses and to quote Khanna, “...it is a system that picks winners and losers, and the losers are new industries that could generate new wealth and added value”.  It’s not that people have new, creative ideas that will benefit our culture as a whole, it’s just that the minute they have an idea, they just fear that they might get a lawsuit slapped on to their idea.

I understand that one’s individual work should be protected as they worked hard and invested countless hours of time and dedication to create their respective works, but I do not think that the federal government should have the power to police and decide who’s stealing from whom, let alone use taxpayers dollars to help out a select few that can already help themselves.