The Cow said “Sod off Copyright when that is my place”.

Except there is no balance. Copyright overrides everyone’s rights (property rights, ownership rights, rights of free speeh and communication, etc) in ways which would be considered ridiculous if Goebbels had been handling the legal drafts.

“Artist has excuse rights for limited time”

Lifetime + 70 years? Not exactly “limited” given that even medical patents are restricted to maximum 20 years.

And neither patent rights, nor trademark rights, nor any other outgrowth of Intellectual “property” can object for someone manufacturing a perfect copy for personal use, with their own materials and machinery.

Copyright can, and does.

Your hypothetical “see-saw” is actually a plumb line today.

In the open-source sector, certainly. In the commercial arena you can’t even propose a new research project without having a horde of lawyers poring over the proposed research to ensure you won’t expose your company to some competitor with an obsolete patent or ten vaguely touching on your proposed creation.

Here’s a hint – IP lawyer time easily takes more money than the actual research will, in most areas. Now try to guess how many great ideas get buried just because no one dares to field them today.

Doesn’t it even strike you as slightly odd that in the most competitive fields today, such as the mobile phone industry, the only real innovation is happening in Android and other *nix-based systems?

The actual hardware used by every manufacturer is, essentially, the same, with no discernible difference between the latest iPhone or the latest Google Nexus.

Care to guess why Nvidia and AMD are, essentially, the only companies making graphics cards? Essentially no other company CAN be created – it’d get sued out of existence.

Intel/AMD? Same thing. No other processor manufacturer exists for the home market.

Intelectual Property in that manner, with old obscure patents held like a damocles sword over any would-be inventor, renders the end result predictable – a paradigm where in practical terms the right to innovate at all in a given field is subject to a monopoly.

Try telling the electronics industry this. When was the last time anyone came up with a new processor design, outside of the to tech companies who sit on all the patents? I’ll give you a hint – it isn’t even possible.

The last ten years neither Apple, Samsung, HTC or any other smartphone provider has actually been able to compete by actual innovation. They simply beat one another over the head with multibillion-dollar patent portfolios instead.

In the field of medicine there are any number of areas of research which are essentially banned unless you have the legal werewithal to withstand a suit headed by whatever draconian horde of ambulance chasrs managed to buy some leftovers IP from project HuGo.

Yes, people still innovate – and usually at high peril because if god forbid anyone invents something incredible and doesn’t immediately ship it off as GPL/GNU or CC ten there are entire legal teams just waiting to hit you with a ten-thousand-item lawsuit based on patents which will cost weeks or months of lawyer time to defend again. Edison today wouldn’t even get off the ground. Nor would Tesla or Marconi.

It wasn’t quite this bad twenty years ago, when IP was still cumbersome to employ internationally. Today though…Even Google had to spend 5 billion dollars on an obsolete patent portfolio just to ensure they could conterthreaten Apple.

Would an Aboriginal Australian, or New Guinean immigrant to the U.S. be considered an African American? Uhhh No, a Human Being…who’s ancestors stayed out in the Sun a wee bit to long.