Jonathan Zittrain, a faculty co-director at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, illustrated this argument using the analogy: "[It] makes no sense to imagine somebody after a certain time coming in and taking your rug or your chair and saying 'Sorry, your ownership expired.
[4] He also writes that copyright expiration transfers wealth from private copyright holders to corporations: "'Freeing' a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, The Garden Party, while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.
[5] Public Knowledge issued a response which argued that copyright expiration ultimately provides a net benefit to society.
[6] It distinguishes intellectual property rights from those associated with material goods; the latter "are scarce and rivalrous: [they] cannot be created anew, and only a limited number of people can occupy and use a space at any one time.
[7] Public Knowledge and other critics wrote that existing copyright terms already provide more than sufficient compensation for creators of intellectual property.
[8] Critics of perpetual copyright also point out that creative activity often involves the creation of derivative works that recast or build upon previous material.
Perpetual copyright would create a significant disincentive to the creation of new literary or artistic works which build upon older material.
[10] A debate raged on whether printed ideas could be owned and London booksellers and other supporters of perpetual copyright argued that without it scholarship would cease to exist and that authors would have no incentive to continue creating works of enduring value if they could not bequeath the property rights to their descendants.
Opponents of perpetual copyright argued that it amounted to a monopoly, which inflated the price of books, making them less affordable and therefore prevented the spread of the Enlightenment.
Moreover, he warned that booksellers would then set upon books whatever price they pleased "till the public became as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are".
[16] After Donaldson v Beckett, disagreement continued over whether the House of Lords affirmed the existence of common law copyright before it was superseded by the Statute of Anne.
The Lords clearly voted against perpetual copyright,[17] and eventually an understanding was established whereby authors had a pre-existing common law copyright over their work, but that with the Statute of Anne parliament had limited these natural rights in order to strike a more appropriate balance between the interests of the author and the wider social good.
[22] Separately, the Crown retains rights under the royal prerogative to control printing of the Authorised Version of the Bible, and of the Book of Common Prayer.
J. M. Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan, although out of copyright, is covered by special legislation which grants Great Ormond Street Hospital a right to royalties in perpetuity.
In the case Golan v. Holder (2012), the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could release works from the public domain to submit them again to the protection of copyright, without violating the Constitution.