Googlen tekijänoikeusasioiden seniorineuvonantajan ja raskaan sarjan tekijänoikeusjuristin William Patryn hyvä blogimerkintä siitä, miksi tekijänoikeudet ovat laajentuneet:

Neil Netanel’s “Why Has Copyright Expanded?”

Merkintä pohjautuu professori Neil Netanelin 33-sivuiseen tutkielmaan aiheesta. Lyhyt vastaus otsikon kysymykseen on ahneus, mutta tässä on Netanelin perusteellisempi vastaus:

"My point is not that the motion picture and recording studios are evil actors. It is simply that their interest is not necessarily the public interest. The copyright industries naturally wish to obtain all-encompassing a copyright protection as as possible for their extensive inventories of content. And they naturally wish to use that protection to ward off competition from new media entrepreneurs that threaten their traditional ways of doing business. But the public interest – as reflected in some 300 years of copyright precedent – is for a narrowly tailored incentive for authors to contribute to the store of knowledge and enrich the public domain. Copyright is meant to spur creativity and expressive diversity. When it has the opposite effect – when authors cannot freely build upon their predecessors’ works in creating new expression and when copyright serves as a tool for enriching media conglomerates – something has gone awry."

Mihin Patry toteaa:

"And things have gone very awry. Maximizing profits and eliminating all threats to existing business models are, however, not appealing public positions to take, although one does on occasion hear pure expressions of it, as when CEOs talk about their a duty being to shareholders, and when the hired help is treated like hired help, as witnessed in the current writers’ strikes; the short-lived effort to have sound recordings statutorily enumerated as a category of work for hire; and in the 1998 term extension, when composers were told that if they didn’t agree to have the extra 20 years go to music publishers directly rather than to those who actually created the works, there would be no extension at all: some crumbs are better than none.

It is and has long been an open secret that the paeans to authors paid by those who buy rights are phony; this has been the case since 1709, when book publishers, rebuffed in their efforts to extend monopolistic licensing laws benefiting solely themselves, put authors out in front as lobbying puppets.; and this was in a period of time when authors received a one-time, small payment for all rights: royalties payments were in the future."