Douthat On Digital Barbarism

It didn’t take long for Douthat did it? He used to just be a garden variety conservative commentator struggling to look respectable defending the indefensible. But as he begins the transformation into David Broder, he loses the ability to make a decent argument on any topic at all- even one in which his party identification doesn’t force him to make arguments in poor faith.

I even read Jonah Goldberg’s book

Ha, ha!

fantastic stuff, John!

I have to say I disagree on prudential grounds with Tom Hurka’s proposed implicit duty to reread an article you disagreed with when it comes out in book form. It makes more sense to put the onus on the book author to state upfront what’s new about the book-length version so that reviewers can summarise it, or to write another succinct article summarising why the book isn’t vulnerable to the criticisms made of the article.

Otherwise we’ve got something like a version of the heckler’s veto for bores, who can always defend themselves against deserved criticism by churning out a hundred widely-spaced pages and multiplying their claims on our precious time by a factor of ten or more in a sort of squid-ink defence. Which isn’t to say that people shouldn’t write books or expand on their articles, just that they shouldn’t complain excessively when someone takes the article (which did, after all, go out with their name on it) as a stand alone work.

I started reading that excerpt, but I gave up. Speaking as a Marxist, I was genuinely interested to hear how Helprin would make his case that liberty (of any kind) depends on property rights (of the kind we know and love), so it was a bit of a let-down to find that his major premise was “Stalinism’s bad, m’kay?”

And besides… did he really, genuinely, hand-on-heart truly stop to argue the toss with that farmer? When I was a kid in the country, we thought we had a right to nick stuff from just about anywhere we could get into unchallenged (not that I personally exercised that right very often, you understand), but we knew damn well that the local farmers wouldn’t see it that way. Twerp.

I’m reminded of Will Self’s great line “Does it turn into Tolstoy at page 205?”

Will Self can be forgiven a lot for that debate.

I agree in general with the points made here, but I don’t see the need for the Douthat-thwacking. By the genteel standards of the NYT Book Review, Douthat delivered an extremely negative and almost explicitly derisive assessment of the book.

Sometimes a blog post is just a blog post.

I think dsquared is right about the articles-into-books phenomenon– and not only for the pragmatic reason of time-saving.

If someone writes a very bad public-intellectual argument (say, for the Atlantic, or LRB, or NYROB), and then expands it into a public-intellectual book, the rest of us are faced with a number of choices:

1) Buy the book, thereby contributing directly to the royalties of the bad public intellectual– surely undesirable, not least because it creates a perverse incentive structure (the worse and more inflammatory my stupid article today, provided only that it can get published in a prestige place, the higher my royalties tomorrow);

2) shut up about the whole thing, because we haven’t read the book and therefore aren’t entitled to an opinion– which insulates the author from criticism to some degree, since it’s people with critical views who are most likely to want to avoid contributing to the author’s bottom line;

3) continue to treat the original article as a legitimate statement of the view, subject to correction.

(Yes, I know: as a grad school friend observed on walking into my grad school dorm room, “there are things called ‘libraries’ that will let you read books without having to buy them.” But I’d much rather see people do #3 than either #2 or #1, and would much rather do so myself.)

@18 – ah, you are missing the important distinction between finding stuff out and making shit up, on which the concept of copyright depends. I note approvingly that Ajay places the Bible in the latter category…

alex> Copernicus should have gone for a business method patent…

I don’t really understand what analytic point is furthered by describing extension of copyright as “feudal.” As far as I can tell, Douthat’s only claim about extension of copyright is that Helprin is “plausible when he argues that the direct costs of letting his descendants continue to profit from sales of “A Soldier of the Great War” are minor or even nonexistent.” That seems accurate. But it appears that the majority of John’s complaint is that Douthat must take on board Lessig as the default view on copyright. But is the Lessig view on copyright the default view that the average newspaper columnist must defer to on pain of being foolish? Answer: no, and no.

there are things called ‘libraries’ that will let you read books without having to buy them

Sadly, in the UK at least, authors are compensated for having their books borrowed from libraries via the Public Lending Right (this amounts to a material sum for Catherine Cookson, and pennies for everyone else, apparently, but the point of principle is there). And if you read the book in a bookshop, there’s a danger that you might drop it or otherwise damage it, meaning that the shop can’t send it back to the publisher. If you steal a copy, the original owner might buy a replacement. A friend in the publishing industry ended up concluding that the only morally acceptable way to read a book published by an author whose politics you despise is to break into his house (or his publisher’s offices) and steal one of the promotional copies.

I actually disagree John – I thought that this was a pretty good review, right up until the final paragraph where things did go pear shaped. As I read the review, Helprin (whose book I haven’t read either) isn’t only making stupid arguments about copyright – he is complaining that the Internets are making us all more liable to behave badly, shout at each other using ill-formed prose and all of the rest of it. And this is what Douthat seems to be complaining about in his piece – e.g. the transition bit about “on the broader question of Internet culture.”

The review passed my first basic test of a good review with flying colours: e.g. if the book is a bad book, would the review make you less likely to buy it, and if it is a good book, would you be more inclined. Douthat makes it abundantly clear that this is a book of the bad kind – the paragraph:

As the tone of that last line suggests, alas, it’s hard to write a polemic premised on the assumption that your opponents are monkeys without sounding like a particularly high-vocabulary monkey yourself. Helprin variously describes his foes as “wacked-out muppets,” “crapulous professors,” “regular users of hallucinogenic drugs,” “a My Little Pony version of the Khmer Rouge,” “a million geeks in airless basements,” “mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down” and so forth. The overall effect is like listening to an erudite gentleman employing $20 words while he screams at a bunch of punk kids to get off his front lawn.

was quite well done, I thought. Also the bit about:

Lessig is not a tenth the writer that Helprin is, but he has other gifts — the ability to argue in a calm and ordered fashion; the capacity to at least pretend to give the other side its due; and the ability to avoid fevered prose and name-calling while making a controversial case.

which makes it quite clear by contrast that this is a lunatic book (and the one bit of praise is _right_ – Helprin is a dung-flinging mouth-breather on a whole variety of political issues, but he is sometimes a very good novelist).

Douthat’s argument is an _aesthetic_ argument as I read it – are we more or less likely to get high-culture-ish stuff in a world with the Internet than we would be without it? This seems to be at the least an important subtext of Helprin’s book (like everyone in this conversation, I have no intention of reading the bloody thing to find out). And Douthat seems inclined to agree with Helprin that we are _less_ likely to get high culture in this world than without it. I think that he is wrong, over the long run, on this, but I don’t see that he is _obviously_ wrong.

The last paragraph is rum stuff alright – but seemed to me to be an implicit admission that he didn’t have much to say on the copyright stuff, which is why he was sticking to the broader cultural issues through the main part of the review. And maybe this means that it was a bad review in some other sense – that he didn’t spend much time directly arguing against what are likely very bad arguments – but at the least this is different from your suggestion that he is Brodering it up on the copyright wars. Instead, he is plausibly making a broader claim about cultural politics, which are sort-of orthogonal to the copyright stuff, but also plausibly a major theme of Helprin’s book, and only returning to what he specifically describes as the “narrower issue” at the very end of the review.

Btw – since people sometimes suggest that the reason that Matt Yglesias and others go easy on Douthat since they are all palsy-walsy, let me make it clear that I don’t know him (I did one kind of combative Bloggingheads with him a few years ago, but have never met him, nor corresponded with him privately etc etc).

Anyone else find it odd that in Douthat’s book review, he quotes from an XKCD comic without attribution? Did they reach their hyperlink quota over at the Times or what? Sort of undermines his argument if he can’t even be bothered to cite the artist he’s quoting.

It really only makes sense a way of generating unproductive rent-seeking.

If it’s rent-seeking that is the social evil lurking at the core of extended copyright, presumably the members of the remarkable interdisciplinary consensus of copyright-contemplators are also agitating for term limits to physical property? If not, why do they think one form of rent-seeking is worse than another?

The distinction between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods is rather crucial at this point.

I look forward to the argument as to why.

…are also agitating for term limits to physical property?

Not necessarily term limits. Antitrust laws, I think, would be an example of restricting unproductive rent-seeking.

You’re blogging about a blogger who blogged about a reviewer who reviewed a book? How small is this Universe?

I look forward to the argument as to why.

I think this was covered fairly thoroughly in the previous copyright thread. Truthfully, I didn’t find the distinction between them to be particularly meaningful to those who might be deprived of the fruits of their efforts.

Widespread copying is not theft because you can still use the original. But if the way you wanted to use the original is to be able to sell it, then it might as well have been stolen for all the difference it makes to you.

Anyway, I’m sidetracking the argument. My beef is with the de facto elimination of copyright and IP, not with shortening the copyright period.

As far as Douhat’s piece goes, I have to agree with alkali (#13). The review was a massive pan, with only the bare minimum of “the book is not totally without merit” required of any book review is a mainstream publication. (Those who unremittingly pan a bad book end up looking like impolite jerks in print to those who don’t care about the topic, but like reading book reviews – not a way to get more book review assignments.)

Anyway, I’m sidetracking the argument. My beef is with the de facto elimination of copyright and IP, not with shortening the copyright period.

Of course reality suggests to us that extending the copyright period more or less indefinitely is rapidly leading towards it’s being de facto eliminated. The demands of copyright owners have become exponentially more extensive in the 50 years or so, if they had not done this maybe they wouldn’t have killed the goose that laid the golden egg, as it were. The idea that content owners can perpetually make greater and greater demands of the public and expect this to just be accepted is pretty bizarre.

Helprin is a dung-flinging mouth-breather on a whole variety of political issues, but he is sometimes a very good novelist.

Is he? In the sense that he has written at least one very good novel?

This is a genuine question. I pounced on Winter’s Tale when it came out, having read an excerpt in the New Yorker that had me falling all over myself laughing. And I got a good way into the book thinking it was terrific. But then the lovely verbal pyrotechnics started to get repetitious, and the magic realism got laid on thicker and thicker, and the ugly politics broke the surface more and more often, and by the time I got to the end Helprin was in the mental bin labeled “Authors Whose Future Works I Am Not Going to Read.” Who thinks I was wrong and why?

Would Pride and Prejudice and Zombies be counted as a reprint of Pride and Prejudice (since it does, after all, contain most of the text of the of the original) or a parody?

Seth Gordon: in Douthat’s world, this would be an immaterial distinction, as adding zombies to P&P is defacto “coarsening the language” and it’s co-author would be held in contempt of culture and so he wouldn’t be invited to any of Douthat’s parties, you can be sure.

P&P&Z might not be the best example though, since Austen has no descendants with legal rights under current (or any conceivable) copyright law. Arguments against it would be purely aesthetic (though I’m sure Douthat would muddle the issue with talk about how zombies make him wet the bed, and should therefore be bared form appearing in any book with cultural cache).

As usual, Douthat would be missing the point: that zombies are lots of fun and make every book better, as they add a contemporary gloss to a classical text. As my forthcoming novel, War and Peace and Zombies will no doubt prove.

I believe the idea Douhat was fumbling with was that the accelerated culture squeezes out the old true art of the past. Obviously he hasn’t articulated that argument at all, but I think the notion behind the use of the word Barbarism is that if the fire-and-forget content of the internet prevails, there will be no room for enduring works to be made. It’s a stupid notion, given that I currently know a successful playwright, surviving just fine in the digital age writing for live performance, and he has in fact had to seriously consider what to do with his intellectual property after he dies.

Just to be clear: the rivalrous/non-rivalrous distinction matters most (and perhaps only) if you are making a utilitarian argument. That is, if you believe that the justification for copyright is that the institution of copyright exists to serve some good – say, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. The idea is that the way to maximize utility is to balance incentives to create (gotta have those) with realization of the good provided by lots of people being able to enjoy things that, in fact, lots of people can enjoy, non-rivalrously. (That’s just a first pass. Does it suffice?)

Thanks for the clarification. But I’m not convinced that the rivalrous/non-rivalrous distinction here is in fact completely crucial, ie that it thoroughly insulates physical property from similar utilitarian arguments. Obviously, e.g., it would be better for society at large if you took away the big houses of the great-grandchildren of rich people and housed lots of working families in them. The working families lucky enough to be so housed would of course be enjoying their new digs rivalrously, but I’m unclear as to why that sole distinction suddenly makes the argument unthinkable.

An aside to Tom @ 41:

(Those who unremittingly pan a bad book end up looking like impolite jerks in print to those who don’t care about the topic, but like reading book reviews – not a way to get more book review assignments.)

Actually I think readers often enjoy very hostile reviews. In my experience, it is (some) editors who dislike them & won’t commission more, because they prefer a bogus “balance”. (An editor actually asked me once to put more positive points in a review. I declined, and it was not printed.)

Actually I think readers often enjoy very hostile reviews.

Perhaps, tabloid culture and all that, but I have my doubts.

I will say it is different if you actually have a personal concern about the book, in which case you’ll have a strong enough opinion on the facts that standards for politeness become less important. But for the majority of readers who are simply reading the book section for interesting essays and the occasional book recommendation, failing to maintain minimum standards of civility (where civility is defined by the reader) may make the reader uncomfortable and suspicious of the review.

I take it you’re withdrawing this claim?

I’ll amend it to say that, yes, while it’s conceivable that someone might come up with a case for reinstating ownership rights of Austen’s work to her descendants, no likely copyright law would change this particular work’s status, as it would be a clear cut case of rent-seeking. Also, it’d be ridiculous for a work that’s been in the public domain for a century to suddenly go back into ownership, as it would infringe on any number of other author’s copyright claims (like the rights to modern sequels that didn’t get permission from the estate, parody’s and derivative works like P&P&Z, etc.)

while it’s conceivable that someone might come up with a case for reinstating ownership rights of Austen’s work to her descendants

Indirect subsidy to the legal services industry?

It’s not. Think taxes aimed for redistribution. And to be fair, there’s a number of people who feel that the government should confiscate all your wealth when you die as the good it brings society is higher than the good it brings your heirs.

Sure, I just wonder why people are footling around trying to prevent extensions on (or actually trying to do away with) copyright when they could obviously do so much more social good agitating for reform of private property law with very similar arguments — if doing social good is really their aim, of course.

I think the optimum length is the minimum possible that won’t significantly affect “publish or don’t publish” decisions, as determined by the realities of the publishing industry. That preserves the social purpose of copyright: to promote the creation of marketable works. (If you want to promote nonmarketable works, you need something more NEA-like. This may be important if technology renders more work nonmarketable.) I’m fairly confident that this would be a single-digit number of years.

What about the case of an author who writes an obscure novel that no one takes any notice of and subsequently lives a miserable penurious life, and then 30 years later someone makes a movie of that novel and the reissued edition starts selling like hot cakes. Do you think it fair that the author should get nothing?

It’s a complete side point, but Douthat’s re-framing of the xkcd cartoon is rather offensive. He says:

One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife.

Looking at the cartoon, it’s quite clear:

1. The person at the computer may or may not be male

2. The voice offstage is not given any sex at all, much less the title of “wife”

3. The voice is also not defined as “irritated”

Bah.

Witt at #64,

You’re correct on all the particulars, but I strongly suspect that the majority of people reading the cartoon will read exactly as Douthat did, as that reading conforms to our social experience and norms.

What I don’t understand is how interpreting the cartoon using our social experience is offensive. I pretty much assume each reader assumes the main character has his or her race, for all that it matters (i.e. not at all). Is this wrong? I’ll admit I don’t imagine generic genderless people very well…

What about the case of an author who writes an obscure novel that no one takes any notice of and subsequently lives a miserable penurious life, and then 30 years later someone makes a movie of that novel and the reissued edition starts selling like hot cakes. Do you think it fair that the author should get nothing?”

Well, it would certainly encourage the author to write another novel, which is far from nothing.

What about the case of an author who writes an obscure novel that no one takes any notice of and subsequently lives a miserable penurious life, and then 30 years later someone makes a movie of that novel and the reissued edition starts selling like hot cakes. Do you think it fair that the author should get nothing?”

Well, it would certainly encourage the author to write another novel, which is far from nothing.

30 years after he’s finished living his miserable penurious life? That would take some motivation.

Re: 64 – that’s almost certainly that guy’s girlfriend, from reading that series.

andthenyoufall, bloix, barry — of course you’re right, but we regular/semi-regular xkcd readers aren’t the full audience Douthat was speaking to. And to his audience, presumably ignorant of the original cartoon, he chose to reframe it as more unkind than its author presumably intended.

OK, I’ll stop driving thread-drift now. Apologies, because the substantive topic of this thread is really important and one to which I’m quite sympathetic.

Creators don’t lose the ability to profit from their work when that work enters the public domain. “Authorized editions” and the like do just fine, along with low-, high-, and middle-end editions of older works, annotated editions, and on and on. A novel rediscovered after 30 years of obscurity might well appear, for instance, in audiobook format with an appended interview with the author, or in print with a new introduction; if the author has other works, they might be reprinted as well in thematically similar editions or in an omnibus. None of that depends on the ability to keep others from printing the work, only on the author’s unique ability to say “hi, I’m the author”.

Tom West: And on the flip side, as someone with four novels and a bunch of shorter work in print, I’m quite comfortable with the thought of my work passing out of my control and in fact think this would be a good thing for most creators.

Fixed terms are good for society as a whole: they enable more sensible planning, and they remove occasions for envy, schadenfreude, and the like. And yes, I do mean that – I think it’s a bad idea for people to reap extra rewards just for being healthy or lucky, and unfortunate at best to make it a happy occasion for fellow creators when one of their number dies.

“because no one’s arguing that you should be forced, after all” – I’d dispute that – there are plenty of people arguing for dismantling of the existing system, for various motives, and effectively forcing creators into producing all work directly into the public domain, and making a living from something else (usually at this point a simplistic example will be used to justify this, or some point that ‘X will just have to work for a living’ – ignoring the fact that most authors, song-writers, etc, generally do)

andthenyoufall @ 68:

That story would be just as sad if Congress, in its wisdom, granted Lived N. Penury a 1,000 year copyright on his works, which he then sold for pennies to some publisher, which then 30 years later made tons of money. You can come up with hypothetical tragic examples no matter which way you slice things […] All in all, arguments about the pure dessert of Mr. Penury won’t lead to any conclusions about public policy. Dessert is too sticky a concept, especially if we are talking about perpetual copyrights.

So the retort to a foreseeable negative outcome of a specific policy recommendation is always just “Life is sad, get over it”? My example of the pathetic novelist was merely aimed at the particular suggestion that copyright terms be limited to a “single-digit” number of years. Perpetuity is not the only alternative, and I wasn’t in fact recommending perpetuity.

Copyright was never intended to make life fair.

Well, plenty of anti-copyright arguments are based on some conception of the unfairness of the status quo, eg Ceri B @ 81:

I think it’s a bad idea for people to reap extra rewards just for being healthy or lucky

But again, in that case there are plenty more pressing things to reform in society than copyright law.

John H @ 72:

Steven is right that utilitarian arguments could score against other (physical) property. My large backyard, which people could play in while I’m at work. My bike, while I’m not riding it. My house, while I’m on vacation. Most of the books on my shelves are just sitting there. It wouldn’t deprive me of anything if people used my property while I’m not, so long as they returned it in the state they found it. The utilitarian objection to this sort of thing is that it is massively impractical (for pretty obvious reasons). It’s better for everyone for everyone to have exclusive rights to their own stuff.

Yes, but I don’t see exactly why this rules out periodically redistributing those exclusive rights to people who have less stuff, via term limits on physical property.

John Q:

But, society can’t decree of, say, a house – you can have exclusive possession until you die (or for 50 years, or whatever) and after that everyone can live in it.

I never suggested that it could. I did suggest that someone else or several people could live in it. This is not incoherent.

John H:

Be it noted, we already do have period redistribution on a much more modest scale: namely, taxes are paid once a year, and they are somewhat progressive (one hopes). A system with very high, redistributive tax rates would be an example of egalitarianism with private property.

Yes, but I wonder why people are content with “modest” redistribution with regard to physical property while arguing for total redistribution with regard to “IP”. In general I’m wondering what is the relevant distinction between the two kinds of property such that there is a good argument for term limits on one but no term limits on the other. (I’m not actually interested in infinite copyright terms, unless it turns out that I’m immortal — but then it doesn’t seem consistent that I should be granted an infinite claim on my physical stuff.)

Thanks for that, Ceri B. Out of mere idle curosity, how long does one have to have been using teh interwebs before one feels able to pull rank as a “net veteran”?

My example of the pathetic novelist was merely aimed at the particular suggestion that copyright terms be limited to a “single-digit” number of years.

That post also contained a paragraph on the assignability of rights, which demolishes your example of the pathetic novelist, since his/her publisher would own the rights regardless of how long copyright is. (Unless you think that the poor novelist with no successful book to his/her name would succeed in negotiating contract terms that preserve generous royalties into the indefinite future.)

In any case, since the novel was a flop and the movie was successful, doesn’t that suggest that the movie makers deserve the credit, and the sales contemporaneous with the movie are piggybacking on *their* efforts rather than the reverse? Am I committing lit-crit heresy to suggest that derivative works can surpass the original?

If the original and adaptation are both successful, e.g. the Jeeves and Wooster stories and the Hugh Laurie/Stephen Fry adaptations of same, don’t both parties deserve the credit and the profit in their respective turns?

Your poor (in the economic sense) author might be well advised to write a sequel, though. He/she could probably obtain better terms than he/she got for the original work, even though the original work flopped, because of publishers’ (reasonable) expectation that the sequel’s sales would be improved by the presence of the successful movie. Even under a short copyright regime, the author would stand to do pretty well out of this scenario, if he/she is alive to write the sequel.

“Yes, but I wonder why people are content with “modest” redistribution with regard to physical property while arguing for total redistribution with regard to “IP”. In general I’m wondering what is the relevant distinction between the two kinds of property such that there is a good argument for term limits on one but no term limits on the other. (I’m not actually interested in infinite copyright terms, unless it turns out that I’m immortal — but then it doesn’t seem consistent that I should be granted an infinite claim on my physical stuff.)”

There is a difference between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods. The difference is that non-rivalrous goods can be copied at a negligible cost (relative to the cost of producing the good from scratch).

A copy of my house would cost, roughly as much as it cost to build my house in the first place.

A copy of my car would cost… roughly as much as it cost to build by car in the first place.

A copy of the my recent Joe Pass CD would cost, something like 5c in hard disk space and electricity to run the equipment making the copy, which is 1/300th of what I paid Cutler’s records for it.

A copy of Adobe Creative Sweet would cost about the same 5c, which is about 1/20000th of what I paid for the original.

If I make a copy of a good to use for myself, I am not keeping anyone else who already had it from using it. And in fact, I’m not keeping anyone from selling it either, except to me. If I wasn’t buying at their price, I haven’t actually done anything that hurts them in the slightest, unless I compete with them by selling pirated copies.

If you limit my rights to rivalrous (i.e. hard to copy) goods, you are actually taking the use of a thing away from me. If you limit my rights to keep people from copying non-rivalrous goods, all you are limiting is my ability to extract profit from other people’s activities.

If some builder came up with a new technology that would build a house equivalent to mine for 1/1000th the price, should I have the right to keep that builder from building and selling houses on the grounds that it reduces the value of my house in the resale market?

The argument for copyright is that if people can copy what you create nearly cost-free, then it is hard to make a living creating the originals of such goods, and thus there will be little or no incentive for anyone to produce them. Without the originals, there is no social welfare to the unlimited copying, so we need some way to incent creators of original work.

And that goal is satisfied quite well by a limited term copyright.

Steven, if you read the first Lessig article John H. links to, you’ll see it addresses exactly this point, by noting that real property, unlike intellectual property, is subject to tax. For any given annual tax rate of N%, there is a number of years X such that confiscation (100% tax) after X years has the same present value as an N% tax. This means that, economically, real property is already subject to a time limit. And if you do the math, you’ll see that the time limit of physical property ownership is usually shorter than a copyright term.

The other difference, of course, is that if a house were open to anyone there would be conflicts over who would get use it at any given time, and it would probably be poorly maintained. So there is a social benefit from assigning exclusive use to someone, apart from equity issues. Obviously this is not the case with IP.

Steven,

Yes, different types of physical property are treated differently, both from each other and in different jurisdictions.

The point is just that all forms of property carry various limitations, and at least one very important category of physical property, real estate, is effectively subject to a time limit which is shorter than copyrights. So it is not the case that limitations on the length of copyright are subjecting IP to a special condition that physical property is not subject to. Rather it places IP well within the spectrum of legal regimes that other forms of property exist under.

(This is granting arguendo that IP rights should be conceived of as property in the first place.)

Did this “backyard of a McMansion” thing come from Douthat’s use of the stereotypical “guy who yells ‘you kids get off my property!'”? I read it as more of a “can you run across the corner of the abutter’s lawn to get your ball back?” or “can you sit on the edge of the front yard with your feet on the sidewalk, a foot or two over the property line from your friend’s house next door?”

If I can more than cover my property taxes with the rent from my cigar-chomping hedge-fund-manager tenant, I’m pretty sure I would enormously prefer to keep the massive country house after 30 years of paying the taxes than have it confiscated after 30 years of not paying them

The argument is that they are economically equivalent in that the present value of your future income from the property is the same in both cases.

Of course that doesn’t mean they are equivalent in every respect. Your case is one where you would prefer the tax to the time limit. On the other hand, if you were going to lose the house because you couldn’t pay the tax bill, you might well wish your ownership was time-limited instead. Again, the point is just that limited-duration copyrights are not out of line with the restrictions placed on other sorts of property.

Obviously, it is infeasible to treat IP “just like physical property,” not least because different forms of physical property aren’t treated just like each other. So how then do we decide what legal rules it should exist under? The view of Lessig, CT contributors, etc. is that we should pick the rules most conducive to the public good, and that these will be rules less favorable to IP owners than the current ones.

You evidently disagree; your view seems to be that IP should enjoy a kind “most favored property status” where it is not subject to any limitation unless *all* forms of physical property are subject to the same limitation. But perhaps I’m misunderstanding you?

I fear so!

Well, I read this:

I can see the argument that copyright term limits would be effectively consistent with an ad valorem tax on all physical property

(your emphasis), which certainly seems to imply that unless a restriction applied to all physical property, it shouldn’t apply to IP. But perhaps there’s some other reason you highlighted the word “all”?