Should artists be different from inventors when it comes to intellectual property?
Back in 2012, the Republican Study Committee caused widespread debate over intellectual property law after publishing and then pulling a paper on copyright reform. Derek Khanna, the conservative staffer behind the paper, was fired by the committee shortly afterward.
He may have lost the platform afforded by the RSC, but Khanna is still pushing to have his views on copyright reform heard. His latest writings continue to cause quite a discussion on how copyright should be handled in the United States.
Now a volunteer fellow at the think tank R Street, Khanna has published a new paper titled, “Guarding against abuse: Restoring constitutional copyright.” In it, he argues that US copyright law has deviated from what the founders of our government originally intended for it to be, and questions why artists should be given preferential treatment over inventors when it comes to intellectual property.
“Historically, copyright terms have been quite short,” Khanna writes. The original US Statute gave creators a 14-year copyright term, and an extra 14-year extension if the author was still alive at the end of the first term. Thus, prior to 1976, the average copyright term was just 32.2 years.
Nowadays, copyrights last the life of the creator, plus 70 additional years.
Khanna points out that patent law hasn’t changed nearly as much over the same span of time. Although patents and copyrights started out looking similar to each other, patent terms have increased by 43% while copyright terms have exploded by 580%.
