Perpetual Copyright-- the new inbreeding?

SF author, Mark Helperin (sp?), has written a New York Times editorial proposing perpetual copyright. It's a thought provoking piece, actually. The activists and lawyers have added innumerable comments wrangling over the legal minutae for or against the proposal. Some have even gone so far as to set up a wiki to help craft a rebuttal (which presumably will wind up in the New York Times editorial page when it's completed).

Let's skip the legal crap for a second and talk about . . . genetics.

Ideas are not static, frozen concepts— they are dynamic, evolving gradually over time, and when combined with other ideas can have "offspring." For example, the personal computer would not exist without Morse Code (see Petzold's outstanding book, "C O D E", for the details); "Ten Things I Hate About You" wouldn't exist without William Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew."

Perpetual copyright would create a situation where people who might normally risk combining ideas are discouraged from doing so out of fear of being sued for violating someone's copyright. It's the same thing as the race horse owner who asks for an outrageous "stud fee" for his purebred. In the best case scenario, the horse gets no opportunity to sire, eventually dies of old age, and the bloodline ends. In the worst case scenario, the owner desperately perpetuates the bloodline by breeding the horse with any and every horse in their stable. The problem is the selection of qualities and characteristics in a closed environment, such as one owner's stable or an individual's copyright holdings, is finite. The merit of the idea, both real and perceived, becomes less with each combination and byproduct. Don't believe me? Compare people's responses to Apple's iPod against their reaction to Microsoft's Zune.

But, I hear the lawyers in the crowd objecting, you can't copyright an idea so there shouldn't be any problem.

Yeah, right— because we haven't already seen ignorant misuse or deliberate abuse of DMCA takedown notices by large media organizations (e.g. Major League Baseball) and individuals (e.g. Michael Crook, et alia.) Most people aren't going to have the desire or means to let the legal process run its full course. The "stud fee" is simply too high.