NY Times: Supreme Court to Intervene in Internet Copyright Dispute. Here's hoping the court does the right thing and strikes down the Sonny Bono Act of 1998, aka the "Protect Disney's Cash Cow" Act (Mickey Mouse), which retroactively extended copyrights by 20 years. Every day that goes by that I cannot create my own art featuring Mickey Mouse is a day that Disney, through the United States government, is stealing from me and restricting my rights. Granted, this isn't on the same level as, say, stealing my DVD player, or searching my house without a warrant, but it is a completely unjustifiable infringement on my First Amendment rights. In the Constitution, the power of Congress in this sphere is defined so:

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

Clearly the existence of intellectual property was not intended by the framers; ideas cannot be owned. The above (to me) pretty strongly implies that their feeling was that granting such exclusive rights to ideas was an evil necessary to encourage the generation of new ideas. If you asked them, they would say to make the "limited time" as short as possible. Intellectual property isn't one of those inalienable rights an inventor is entitled to, but rather a license granted by Congress as a reward for their innovation. In fact, the whole point is to have inventors and authors to create worthy works that are accessible to all, for the betterment of society at large. The exclusive license is merely in furtherance of that goal, an incentive to create and also a mechanism to enable creation, so ordinary citizens can devote time and resources to invention without falling into poverty. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that there is an inherent right to ownership of ideas. To rephrase Proudhon: Intellectual property is theft.

Incidentally, there's a direct quote by Thomas Jefferson supporting this:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

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