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”?

The view of Lessig, CT contributors, etc. is that we should pick the rules most conducive to the public good

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?

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?

But anyway, thank you for your roundabout answer to my question, which is apparently that you do think it fair that the novelist should get nothing in such a scenario.

Well, yeah. The book was unmarketable without the marketing campaign and/or rewriting provided by the movie, so it hardly seems reasonable for the author to expect society to maintain him in his hobby of writing unmarketable books.

Anyway, it’s not like paying him 30 years later will induce him to go back in time, quit his day job, and write more books in the intervening 30 years. As already pointed out twice, he does still have a post-movie incentive to write a sequel – or, come to think of it, the movie producers might just cut out the inefficient middle step and hire him to write a screenplay for the next movie, since his first book apparently worked better as a movie than as a book anyway, revealing that he missed his calling. Either way, society might benefit more than if he rested on his laurels, so it’s good to have an arrangement that incentivizes him to keep creating. (Within reason – we shouldn’t abolish retirement programs or anything. But those concerns apply to all workers, not just IP creators.)

 
I’ve also found a bigger flaw in your scenario: in a long-copyright universe[1], some such movies don’t get made at all, because the author or other rightsholder either vetoes the project or demands a price that makes it unworkable. Since (ex hypothesi) the movie would have been successful, preventing its production is socially harmful; since the book languishes in obscurity without the movie, any value it might have had is effectively lost to society as well. And of course the author has no valuable sequel/screenplay opportunity either – note that the author is deprived of this opportunity even if the rightsholder, who may not be the author, makes the decision that kills the movie.

Even if the negotiations are successful they’re still costly and therefore chill the production of some movies on the margin. (For the same reason, a standard royalty fixed by law with no negotiation with the original author necessary can still chill some adaptations that would have been made and succeeded otherwise. And I haven’t even addressed the issue of control over the content of the adaptation.)

In a short-copyright universe, the movie makers don’t have to consult the author of a 30-year-old flop (or his heirs or assigns) any more than they have to consult Shakespeare, and a popular movie is made, the public enjoys it, and the movie makers are rewarded for their work. Why give the author a second bite at the apple at all, let alone in a way that might derail the whole enterprise?

[1] In a universe that is heterogeneous w.r.t. copyright length, such movies mainly or only get made in the short-copyright jurisdictions where the author doesn’t have to be consulted or paid; harsh words are likely to be exchanged between different jurisdictions; and the long-copyright jurisdictions have deprived themselves of beneficial opportunities to create derivative works without even providing any benefit to their original creators in the process. (It’s even worse if the long-copyright jurisdiction bans the derivative work because of its copyright-violating properties – then it, but not the short-copyright jurisdiction, loses the social benefit of the work’s existence, too.)

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.)

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.

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.

That post also contained a paragraph on the assignability of rights, which demolishes your example of the pathetic novelist

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.)

But anyway, thank you for your roundabout answer to my question, which is apparently that you do think it fair that the novelist should get nothing in such a scenario.

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.