Making Sense of Intellectual Property Law

Reason.com: The United States Constitution grants Congress the power "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." Today intellectual property law arguably does not serve that purpose, morphing instead into a tool to secure the incomes of lobbyists, lawyers, and powerful special interests. The successive retroactive extensions of copyrights, for example, make a mockery of the phrase "for limited Times" and surely don't create incentives to create what was already created. And it hardly promotes the Progress of Science and useful Arts to suppress technological innovations, as Congress did when it tried to ban the VCR in the 1980s. It failed to block that development, but it succeeded in hampering DVD technology in the 1990s and in prohibiting outright technologies that might be used to circumvent technical protection mechanisms on copyrighted material, even if the technology can also be used in perfectly legal ways.