One other thing: why didn’t NPR put more lessig into the main piece? Surely this is an injustice that rivals the government’s thievery of the heirs of sylvia plath.

Helprin is not content to overlook lease-hold, he also ignores tied housing and the enclosure of agriculture land between 1760 and 1820. Sometimes land is owned in common, not individually. Do your heirs have the right to the house and land that you paid for, and worked on and for? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Property rights are an aspect of commercial law and they have a specific purpose: prosperity. If, in 1989 it had been the communist East Germany that was rich and the capitialist West Germany that was poor, we would have abandoned individual ownership in favour of common ownership. Perhaps that is an absurd counterfactual to contemplate. We must have some system to ensure the the marginal costs of production are met and property rights and market prices are the only system that has stood the test of time.

But what of the non-recurring costs of production? How do we pay our artists and our inventors? Are they to have a recurring fee linked to the volume of production, or are they to have a lump sum, a fee for the work done? Can we have a utopia in which our favourite artists are free of the tyranny of the day-job and may create full time, unfettered by copyrights on existings works that they wish to improve, rework, remix, play-off and adapt? Probably not, but the problem we face is clear enough: construct that system of commercial law that best conduces to artist abundance.

I envy Helprin his 1100 words of opinion in the New York Times. I am annoyed that he wasted them obfuscating the problem instead of trying to solve it. I will not be buying his book.