Revisiting The Question Of Who Deserves Copyright from the no-one-deserves-it dept Our final post last Friday was to point out that if your argument in favor of copyright (or stronger copyright) is that an artist "deserves" it, that argument is wrong . The basic point was that copyright discussions are not about the moral issues. Copyright was established in the US not because artists "deserved" it. In fact, the first copyright law really didn't protect "artists." It was for the sake of knowledge and learning, and only covered maps, charts and books -- but not things like music, news or plays. The key point, however, was that copyright was designed to advance such knowledge, and more specifically to "promote the progress of science." That post kicked off quite the discussion. Last I looked, there were close to 800 comments on that article, which may set a record. What struck me as interesting was that many critics of the post jumped to the conclusion that if you say it is wrong that anyone "deserves" copyright, it means that there should be no copyright at all. But that wasn't what the post said at all. It was pretty explicit (I thought!), that it was merely saying that any debate over copyright needs to focus on that question of whether or not it promotes the progress, and not on the moral argument that anyone "deserves" such a government granted monopoly. It was nice to see that much of the discussion in the comments