Look at your mewling phrasing. You're "afraid" that I'm "mean"? My viewpoint is not a "grasping attitude". To quote the relevant part of the USA's Constitution

Look at your mewling phrasing. You're "afraid" that I'm "mean"? My viewpoint is not a "grasping attitude". To quote the relevant part of the USA's Constitution [0]: "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." Copyright is not for your children. It is a limited right given specifically to you, the author or inventor. How did you confuse it with property rights? You are free to invest the earnings that you make from exercise of your copyright, and to give those investments and savings to your progeny; you are not free to so invest your works, because upon your passing, they are no longer yours, but enter the public domain. You chose to share those works with the public, taking their money with the understanding that the money would support you in your artistic efforts; the public, in turn, has a shared cultural knowledge which incorporates your art. Your second paragraph is a bland restatement of the basic reason why copyright exists: Copying is easy, art is hard, so copyright is necessary to ensure that artists get paid enough to live on and create more art. However, art only happens within a cultural context, so it's also necessary to have a large and robust public domain. This balance between copyright and the public domain is reflected in the legislative history of copyright [1] around the time of the drafting of the Constitution. To paraphrase a popular lyric, when you go knockin' on heaven's door, please leave your tools; you won't need 'em anymore. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne