The question of whether the great-grandchildren of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle should have approval over Sherlock Holmes films and TV, plus an income from the copyright, or whether Sherlock should be accepted to be part of the wider culture, no longer exclusively owned by the Conan Doyles does not seem one that is difficult to settle.

So why do we have a problem with the same issue when it’s about Walt Disney’s great-grandchildren, or Time-Warner?

There are a number of battles already ongoing:

1. The continual extension of copyright under Lobbyist pressure of the US Congress - to protect Mickey Mouse and older movies.. Can this go on forever, and does the EU have to follow the US down this route, as our politicians are less dependent on the industry for funding?
2. The EU looks keen to legislate on patents, as mentioned above. Innovation and hence economic growth will be largely dependent on the tightness of patent law as it evolves in the next 20 years. It could all go horribly wrong, we’ll see. The Lib Dems in the European Parliament haven’t exactly been on the side of the light so far.
3. The regulation of the Internet - control of servers, encryption libel, illegal information, anonymity and the like rages at the moment. The US Congress simultaneously requiring more control over US companies, whilst chastising them for working in cooperation with the requirements of China. There could be some technology solutions to anonymity and the like here, but what will lawmakers do?

I guess we’ll have to wait to see what the next battles of the 21st century will be. I’m already sensing concerning moves in terms of DNA, human genome, plant/crop DNA ownership issues - Right now this all seems terribly uncoordinated.. I wonder if there’s an opportunity for a new settlement that doesn’t take too much of a corporatist perspective on things.

Firstly, Barry. I wasn’t singling out sporting events so much as music events - as I alluded to with football for instance there are legal restrictions on ticket sales which have very little to do with revenue protection and everything to do with crowd control and crime reduction. But even with that caveat, I’m not convinced your criticism holds up.

For one thing, ticketing at a standard price often leads to stadiums being empty. Auctioning tickets would create incentives for people to attend less popular matches. Ultimately, the reason there is a touting market out there is that people are willing to pay more for tickets for certain events; far better to formalise that at the point of sale rather than this informal market.

In terms of long term crowds, there are other ways of ensuring this than artificially reducing the ticket price. The time honoured way of course is to sell season tickets, which are much easier to link with an individual and therefore less prone to touting. Yet all the football fans I speak to complain of their clubs cutting back on season tickets. I’m not convinced they are the benevolent guardians of long term supporters that you present them as.

Joe, mea culpa. I didn’t discuss patents at all in that article and it is certainly a glaring omission. The reason I think it is relevant to the arts is that this amounts to the mass privatisation of our culture. Already we are seeing a music industry going bonkers and trying to get people fined or imprisoned for what they put on their iPod, despite the fact that popstars’ earning potential now is vastly more than it was a couple of decades ago. With the pace of technology what it is, how long before they move on from iPods and onto people’s brains? Can’t get that annoying new song out of your head? That’ll be £50 please. I’m exaggerating, but not much.

As for Harry Potter, yes, I do think that if Rowling hadn’t had come up with the idea someone else would have. After all, all she ultimately did was combine the whole boy wizard idea (Luke “Summer Magic” Kirby, Tim “Books of Magic” Hunter, er, Luke “Star Wars Episode 4″ Skywalker) with the longstanding British genre of boarding school-related fiction (Billy Bunter, the Four Marys, etc.). Some would argue that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did that decades earlier with the X-Men. Enjoyable though the books may be, a startling act of originality they most certainly are not.

ISTM it is fair enough to say to an innovator - thanks for coming up with this, have a monopoly. And, further, somebody else would have thought of it sooner or later, so you can’t have the monopoly for ever. A flat number of years for a patent seemed a reaonable arrangement. Yet to most small and medium innovative software companies, patent law will only ever be a threat and never an opportunity. It is too expensive and cumbersome to play with, and more expensive to be tripped up by. I imagine this may often be the case outside software. Perhaps a higher innovativeness threshold is needed. And perhaps a different approach to fast moving fields, that might allow us to spend more on innovation than on lawyers.

Anyhow, would anybody else, sooner or later, have invented Harry Potter?