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bigiaintoday at 3:14 AM0 repliesview on HN

Keep in mind "copyright" explicitly does not cover "knowledge" or "ideas".

The reason I buy books is rarely for knowledge or ideas, its either for a good story in the case of fiction (which the author definitely should have the right to exclusively commercialise), or for the authors explanation of and idea or some knowledge which goes beyond the raw information I could find in the scientific papers or higher level descriptions.

Good storytelling and teaching are valuable and should come with some sort of exclusive rights to control and profit from by the author. And even bad storytelling and teaching should have that same protection from other people distributing it in ways that restrict the authors rights.

Clearly 130 years of protection is insane, and all it does is keeps Micky Mouses lawyers able to buy new yachts. But as others in this discussion have pointed out, after 20 year almost all of the authors who are still earning money off their works are already rich beyond most authors realistic hopes. I'm not sure 20 years is "the right length" for protection, you sometimes hear stories of works being rediscovered and becoming wildly popular more that 20 years past the original publication date (Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill getting back into the charts on the back of it being used in Stranger Things - for example).