Our culture would be substantially reduced if we removed all copying.

> there should be no termination to it and his family should profit from it forever.

What purpose would that serve for society?

> We should never take away the rights of the people who create things. If is their choice to give openness to them.

We created those rights out of nothing to begin with. Without artificially created monopoly protections, these people would have no basis for preventing copying. People have the choice not to publish. Yet people willingly published before copyright too.

Those temporary rights were granted as a bargain: We give up the right to copy for some time, in return for hopefully gaining in the form of encouraging more creation of content. As it stands, it seems a lot of us believe that the bargain has been shifted too much in favour of content creators.

the creator should have the sole right to set the terms of use and transfer the terms. It is his property.

If they want to be immortalized as a contributor to the common culture, they will have to relinquish control sooner or later.

Otherwise, your creation loses relevance and fades away. Extant copies deteriorate. Collectors lose interest. Your work moves from the paragraph body to the footnotes. Artwork requires a continuous investment of creative energy, otherwise it is replaced by the work of other artists. Museums keep works on display, and encourage patrons to enjoy them as frequently as they are able. Corporations produce series sequels and souvenir merchandise. Artists cross-license their work to creators that work in different media, such as book authors optioning movie rights to film studios.

Works in the public domain get remixed into more contemporary works. Characters like Captain Nemo, Dorothy Gale, and Alice (in Wonderland) will never die because anyone who cares to do so can refresh and update their image in the zeitgeist.

Take the Norse deity Thor. Would the typical person outside of the Germanic and Scandinavian countries know anything about him if he were not included in non-original stories and artworks, like jewelry, altar carvings, and the eddas? Would anyone care if Marvel did not adopt him into its comic pantheon? Will he enjoy being a woman as much as his adopted brother?

The common culture evolves continuously. The laws are in place to encourage participation by folks who would not otherwise be able to expend the effort without compensation. They are not there to wall everything off and put locked gates everywhere. At some point, we need to be able to remember our childhood without paying someone a licensing fee.

This doesn't make sense to me. You can allow people to consume your work but not replicate it or consume it for free. The philanthropic nature of the artist is different than his creative ability.

copyright contains ownership, control, consumption, usage. It should be for the creator to determine.

As such, copyright law established an artificial, temporary monopoly which from the outset it was acknowledged was separate from ownership.

And unlike property law, which is frequently (though not universally) seen as codifying "natural" rights to ownership and use, with copyright the bargain is explicit:

The copyright holder is granted restrictions on the rights that would otherwise be held by the public as an incentive to contribute to benefit society as a whole.

There is no inherent right for a creator of a work to expect society to limit the spread of information for their benefit. To grant copyright, society is limiting our freedom of expression to conjure out of thin air a commercial monopoly.

To argue that the bargain is fair is one thing, but confusing copyright with property is something else entirely.

> the creator should have the sole right to set the terms of use and transfer the terms.

The creator does not have the sole right to set the terms of use and transfer under any jurisdiction today. If you argue for that, you argue for a regime so restrictive that we have never seen its like. What you are implying is even far stricter than what applies to actual property.

For example, almost all countries have some system of compulsory licensing. All countries I'm aware of have expiring copyright terms (moves to try to perpetually extend the stated duration notwithstanding). All have exceptions of certain types of copying.

All puts limits as to the extent which the creator of a work may limit (even contractually) usage, even in cases where the creator explicitly avoids selling copies and instead merely licenses or leases instances of the work. (E.g. very few jurisdictions would allow the creator of a work to limit use by race or gender).

It is up to society to set these restrictions because these rights only exist because of the intervention of society in the first place. If a creator does not accept the bargain with wider society, they are free to never release their work. We are not obliged to support rent seeking - the bargain must be balanced accordingly to make up for the self imposed restrictions on freedom of expression that it creates.

Also, how does mixing and modifying things damage the original? The original is still there and you can appreciate it without worrying about stuff someone else has done with it. That is specially true in software that's what makes it such a great medium.

If we were to ban any derivative work you'd need to forget about pretty much any "art" done in the last 400 years (to say a number). As mentioned somewhere else Tolkien's work is not "original" in that case then, it's a mash-up of European mythology. What about music? most modern music relies on samples of other works (check this TED talk by Mark Ronson about it: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_ronson_how_sampling_transforme...). And TV/Film? Many movie/tv scripts are just a modern version of Shakespeare's works. Anything we do now is influenced by something someone has done before, that's called progress and if we block this with made up "laws" we are going to be very impoverished as a society.

No one can ever experience the original, because the context of everyone's experience has changed. Would your perception of Lord of the Rings be the same before and after reading Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones? Would it even be the same before and after the France-U.S.-Vietnam War? Would it have been the same if written before World War 2?

When a work is created, the intention of the artist is fixed, but as artwork, it is continuously shaped by the perceptions of its audience. Art holds a mirror up to life, and that evolves.

So experiencing the original is quite impossible now. People who did experience the original have already gone on to reshape the culture with their own works, and we cannot, for instance, un-see the Peter Jackson films based on the books.

There may be a weak argument to be made there in favor of copyrights, since a derivative work could be so much more popular than the original that people are no longer willing to pay enough to maintain it. But it isn't as though a book will spontaneously burn itself if someone writes an unauthorized sequel or translation. The worst that could possibly happen to it is that people stop making fresh copies and forget that it exists.

That's the real ruin for artwork--being thrown into the Lethe.

He is promoting a view of copyright that extends far past the rights granted by any extant copyright system, in a forum where a lot of us are very aware of how much of culture is constant remixing and borrowing, or outright "stealing" of past content that has only been possible because copyright law is not nearly as exclusionary as the property law principles he seems to believe should apply (and as I pointed out elsewhere, in his other comments he hints at support for a degree of control which does not even apply to any property law system in the world) .