Project:The copyright status of Wittgenstein’s works: Difference between revisions

The difference between intellectual property and the property of material goods, however, has implications that reach beyond the relative ease of breaching the former compared to breaching the latter. The very power of culture consists in the possibility for words, pictures, music, etc. to be reproduced with relatively little effort and, most importantly, ''without thereby consuming, diminishing, or getting any closer to the depletion of the “source”''. As the saying—often misattributed to George Bernard Shaw—goes: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas”. The benefit that society as a whole gains from the exchange and the transmission of ideas has long been clear. Therefore, a limitation always accompanies the affirmation of the author’s rights over their works: eventually, copyright expires, and the works become public property. Unlike the property a house, then, which can be handed over from parents to children by way of inheritance for, in principle, endless generations, the intellectual property of a creative work expires two to three generations after the author’s death, depending on the country or territory.