Copyrights, Lessig and Helprin

Lawrence Lessig has started a wiki discussion of copyright in response to Mark Helprin's recent OpEd article in the NY Times, "A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?", who suggests that copyrights, like physical property rights, should last forever. Helprin concludes: No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.