| | Aaron,
I don't have time for too much detail, so here is a (more or less) quick version on a few thoughts. You mentioned an idea I find very strange: property that applies in perpetuity. The reason I find this strange is that how can a man own something when he is dead? The simple answer is that he can't. Property is for the living.
Property is not a metaphysical condition—it is only a social one. I like the phrase "social convention" (with convention meaning here "pact" or "agreement," not "habit"), but this phrase sets off kneejerk reactions among Obujectivist/libertarians and I tend to avoid using it. Still, without a society, property means nothing in practical terms. For a man stranded on a desert island, hypothetically the whole island is his property, but that doesn't mean too much. It means about the same thing as the ground under our feet being our property when we walk over it, i.e., a part of the earth available for our use at the moment. Let's call this the "possession" concept of property.
One of the greatest accomplishments of capitalism was in changing the concept of property to include intellectual input. In olden times, a kingdom was the personal property of a king and he did not have to do anything for it other than use force. It was a grant from God and anyone who contested that was killed. (Brazil is suffering from this kind of residue from colonial times, when the King of Portugal granted "Capitancies" the size of large states to members of the court. These have been handed down over the years and some personal estates are still about the size of Rhode Island. Families sit on them and do not develop the land or allow it to be developed.) The defining principle behind this concept of property is that one gang had bigger clubs than all others and they bashed and killed enough people to establish their exclusive use of that land.
The capitalist concept of property means that actual use by living human beings is involved. This use needs to be more than simple nomadic wandering for hunting, too. Capitalistic property can only exist with intellectual input and work added. So intellectual input is just as fundamental to the concept of property as possession is. It was only after this concept of property started becoming protected by law that the enormous wealth we presently enjoy was able to be created.
Normal property will include all three elements: (1) tangible part of the earth or earth's elements (or, later down the road, outer space), (2) intellectual input and (3) work. But the law does not just protect the entire product, it protects each element under certain conditions. If it is just for a worker to receive wages for helping to create wealth, why is it not just for the creator of the intellectual input to remain without compensation? Just as slavery has been outlawed for workers, why is slavery of creators to be tolerated?
Notice that in all patent laws, where the development of a product is incremental and includes many patents, no one patent owner is allowed income to the entire product. He merely receives a "wage" for it (actually a fee, but I am illustrating a point), based on the "piece work" concept, so to speak. His contribution is more valuable than a factory worker's (although both are fundamental) because without him, the product would not exist in that form. That is why he receives per piece sold and the worker receives per hour worked. (These are general observations and obviously there are many variations.)
Although the term "property" is used for intellectual property, it is not the same concept as that for a finished product. It is a legal condition assigned to an idea essentially to guarantee the creator income from actual finished products. Notice that intellectual property only exists in law. Without law, it does not exist at all. There is no way to use simple force to obtain it (like conquering others for a piece of land) because without use (i.e., being added to a tangible element plus work), it does not create wealth. You cannot seize a man's mind and a good idea is only that—a good idea and nothing more—until you do something with it. On the other hand, the person who invented the wheel would have been hard put to receive royalties from tribe leaders, but the wheel is used in most wealth-producing products, even at a primitive level.
If you are concerned about the use of force in this issue, notice that force has been used to keep income from the creator over the centuries. The concept of property was mere possession and any intellectual input was incidental. The king was going to keep his land regardless of who did what on it and he backed that up with armies. Frankly, I can easily imagine our poor inventor of the wheel being bashed to death with a club by a thug who took his wheels from him, but the idea caught on regardless.
The glory of capitalism and individual rights is that now force is used to protect intellectual income. Once again, notice that wealth is created. Unlike the ancient kingdoms, which were basically static wealth-wise (if you took something, the impact was felt hard because there was not much to go around), capitalism provides increasing wealth—i.e., wealth that did not exist before and would not exist without all three elements. A charge for intellectual input can never exceed more than the products generate. In practice, only a fraction for intellectual input is ever charged.
The bottom line is that a charge for intellectual input is only made on the wealth that such input helped create and would not have existed without it. A charge is never put on taking something already existing from someone.
These thoughts apply to both patents and copyrights.
On time limits, all the arbitrary time limits that have been set throughout the history of the emergence of intellectual property (which, incidentally, is fascinating) are actually matters of inheritance—not matters of the personal property of the creator.
There is only one facet of all intellectual property that is applied in perpetuity: moral ownership. This means that whoever created it has his name attributed as creator and no one can ever remove that and then claim to have done it. (There are a few other minor considerations.)
Essentially most all other facets of property (including intellectual property) involve money, and money is a tool for the living. Dead people can't spend it and currencies constantly change as societies change. Your question about time limits involves the issue of inheritance. This is almost another issue since it deals with the rights of the dead. Essentially, I believe inheritance laws for all property should be the same and, by nature, they cannot be for perpetuity.
The problem resides in the nature of man. He constantly changes his society. As more and more wealth and technology are created, the context is often changed drastically. Arbitrary time limits set for inheritance more-or-less take the original owner's span of knowledge (time-wise) into account. Most people will never know their great-great grandchildren, so they can designate what to do with their own property to about the time of their great grandchildren within what they actually know. This is not a hard-and-fast rule and laws vary, but that is the basic reason for the time limits. Property does not exist separately from human beings, and human beings have a specific nature, which includes time limits for existence and awareness.
If man ever becomes immortal, the concept of property would have to change to include this element.
(I hope this is clear. I wrote more than I wanted to, but this is actually only scratching the surface.)
Michael
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