> Only in the sense that "property is theft." Copyright and property are fundamentally different things with different histories and different treatments under

> Only in the sense that "property is theft." Copyright and property are fundamentally different things with different histories and different treatments under the law. Almost all human societies have property or at least a system of possession which excludes others. Copyright is a modern invention. If I take your car you're out a car, but if I take a song you're singing you don't even have to know. > How does it rob you of a part of "our culture" if I require that I get paid for any re-publication you do of work that I create? Have you heard of Google books? It's an incredibly ambitious project where google went and scanned a bunch of library books and put them on the web where they can be searched and read. For works in the public domain you can download the full text of the book and do whatever you want with it. It's like the world's biggest library, except the only books with text are the ones from the 1920s and earlier. Everything else is just a dust jacket. I've been reading a lot of early 20th century books. When I find a good one I can email my friend a like to a book by Upton Sinclair or H.L. Mencken. But I won't be able to do that for decades with Salinger, if ever. Creative works don't belong to anyone, but to all of us. We grant artists a temporary monopoly to encourage them. This I can live with, but please lets actually make it temporary. Why shouldn't LotR be in the public domain? The author is dead. Who is collecting royalties?