Of course, the counter argument (indeed, Jefferson’s own) is that stasis is neither constructive nor desirable. Copyrights originally existed for only a short term, giving the author a temporary monopoly over the material he has created, as a necessary evil in order to ensure some due compensation to the author and thereby to encourage him to continue producing and adding to the cultural discussion.

What copyright was never meant to do was to reward a person for squatting on a creation for the rest of his life, both stifling the exchange of ideas and providing no particular incentive to the creation of new ideas. If you’re still raking in the money from something you did twenty years ago, and are living quite comfortably, where’s the active encouragement to keep contributing?

Yet, especially with the recent concept of “intellectual property”, that’s exactly what copyright (and trademark and patent) law has come to represent. And to a certain extent, that is troubling. On the one hand, you’ve the argument that Mr. Ayres gives here — that, in a sense, once you’ve uncorked the bottle you’ve responsibility to it forever. On the other, there’s the concept that (as phrased by someone famous) everything has its time and everything dies. For instance, what does Betty Boop really mean anymore? She was a caricature of things in popular culture at the time she was created. Today, there’s no context for the character; she’s just a random icon who lives on beyond her natural expiry date because she was once considered valuable.

Perhaps in the future she will be valuable again in a different context, if reinvented by someone else to represent something new. As long as she’s mired up as a piece of property, though, that is far less likely to occur. Neither will she be allowed to simply sink.

Modern culture is something of a zombie — an animated corpse, built of expended ideas kept in play because nobody can afford to let them drop. Partially as a result, it’s harder and harder to create anything new without infringing on what’s come before and drawing someone’s ire and lawyers. The emphasis is, it could well be argued, in exactly the wrong place: toward maintaining arbitrary infrastructure rather than toward growth and change.