As detailed in Part 1 of this article, property rights are a fuzzy concept that must be interpreted in light of prevailing circumstances surrounding a particular instance. Intellectual property rights are particularly fuzzy and have changed markedly in their economic effect as technology has advanced.

What direction should be followed in the future thus needs to be analyzed, not from some abstract principle, but by looking at its likely practical economic and social effects.

As I set out in Part 1, the principal effect of copyright law in the 20th century has been to increase enormously the amount of mass-market culture produced and its remuneration. Technology’s nominal effect on high culture has been equal to that on mass culture (Oxford University would now not have to read 2,000 pages of manuscript for Edward Earl of Clarendon’s “History of the Great Rebellion,” it would receive it on a couple of floppy discs or a CD).

However, with a few exceptions such as the 2003 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, technology has had only a modest effect on the amount and quality of high culture produced. In the mass culture area, it has created a number of entirely new markets of enormous size.

The demise of the Napster file-sharing software, for example, and attempts by the recording industry to prevent the emergence of successors to Napster, have had very little effect on the classical music scene. In general, lovers of classical music wish to listen to an entire opera or symphony, not just a song or two, and they wish to listen to it in the highest fidelity sound possible.

For any but the commonest of “warhorses” they welcome sleeve notes that explain the provenance of the music and the orchestra playing it and, for an opera or oratorio, give the libretto. Further, they want to continue to listen to the music over a period of years, since it does not go out of style, and there is no “new sound” to which they can transfer their musical allegiance. Therefore, they require physical CDs, with proper labeling, so they can store their music collection for later use.

Consequently, allowing free download of MP3 files has very little effect on the classical music lover. He or she will still continue to buy physical CDs, with sleeve notes and covers, or whatever high-quality musical format, audio or video, succeeds them

In this light, the two proposals made by the recording industry for securing their copyright income from Napster-type copies make little sense. Allowing a royalty of say 25 cents for each playing of a song will simply inject yet more money into the mass market music business, making it economically still more attractive to concentrate on that end of the business and ignore the high-quality end of the music business.

Moving to a “commons” system, whereby computers or CDs are taxed and the proceeds re-distributed to performers by some kind of government board, will increase costs and replace market demand by bureaucratic demand. Jailing teenagers, to enforce either of these two alternatives, will simply bring the recording industry into disrepute.

Continued free download of music files thus doesn’t de-fund the music business as a whole, it de-funds only the mass market end of the business. Moreover, it does not de-fund it totally.

Britney Spears and her managers have many sources of revenue beyond royalties; there are the personal appearances, the T-shirts, the memorabilia, the advertising, the MTV performances etc. With free copying of music, Britney Spears will still exist; it will simply become relatively somewhat less profitable to create yet another hyped marketing pop music phenomenon for the masses. Thus the proletarianization of mass culture that took place during the 20th century will be at least partly reversed.

Conversely, the 20-year extension of copyright lobbied through Congress by Disney and others, that came into effect last month, is also an attempt to increase the returns from mass culture. While many major works of art were produced during the 1920s, there is no great money to be made from the copyrights of Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” or Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.”

Mickey Mouse, on the other hand, remains an immensely profitable franchise that Disney naturally wishes to milk until the end of the current 95-year copyright in 2023, and longer if possible. The original 1928 Mickey Mouse movies, “works of art” that they may have been, are an infinitesimal part of the long term profitability of Mickey Mouse, which now stems from exploitation of the character in theme parks, and production of entirely new movies with the character as centerpiece.

Giving copyright for 95 years, far longer than the lifetime of the producer of the item (Walt Disney died in 1966) is analogous to George, first Duke of Sutherland evicting highland crofters and replacing them with sheep. It is an extreme manifestation of alleged property rights that produces manifest injustice, in this case wholly unearned income to the present-day managers of Disney (who in good years are exorbitantly remunerated through stock options.) After no more than 50 years, works of art should be in the public domain, where free competition can co-exist for their exploitation.

In the movie business as a whole, the trend should also be towards the acceptance of the Napster model and the rejection of the Disney model. Traditionally, movies made most of their money from public showings at movie houses. Because of the far greater impact of a movie on a large screen in a darkened room, without interruptions, this is still the preferred method of viewing top quality movies and provides substantial income to their producers.

On the whole, repeated viewings of even the best movies are not particularly popular. Hence the video business, and still more the Internet download business, have depended for their profitability on much lower quality fare, low budget movies, generally violent or pornographic.

Again, extending full copyright protection to such rubbish merely increases the money flowing into the low quality end of the business. It does little for the art movie business, or even for the “first run” top quality movie business.

In summary, the perpetuation and extension of an artificial system of copyright, invented in the 18th century to protect a limited market for high-quality literature, serves simply to increase the funding for the worst elements of modern culture. Better, surely, to cut back copyright protection and thereby decrease the profitability of such trash, in the hope that some of the resources might be redeployed into producing quality material.

Unlike the aging ’60s hippies who call for a “free internet,” I am wholly opposed to the philosophies of Pierre Prudhon; property is not theft, it is the principal bulwark of a civilized society. But in the long run Sutherland too proved immensely damaging to property rights, by carrying them to an unacceptable extreme and producing a political reaction.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)

This article originally appeared on United Press International.