The difficult balance of intellectual property

[Commentary] Intellectual property law must strike a difficult balance.

There is public benefit from the widest possible access to and use of creative output. There is also a public interest in ensuring that artists and their publishers have incentives to produce new work. There are few certainties in judging the effects of such policies, but there are some. John Lennon will never sing another song. James Joyce will never publish another novel, and Picasso will never pick up his brush again. No financial incentives can now affect the quality or quantity of their work.

Yet the US Congress and the European Commission have been much exercised in increasing the rights of the dead, or those whose creative years are long behind them. The Sonny Bono Copyright Act of 1998 extended the term of American copyright in written material and was quickly followed in Europe. Thanks to the efforts of Mr Bono and my doctors, copyright in my prize essay for excellence in Scottish literature will probably endure into the 22nd century. More recent pressure to extend copyright terms has focused on sound recordings. While this plan has been rejected several times, pressure from interest groups is relentless.