At the heart of copyright law are “conflicting cultural,economic, and political values.”82 Copyright is supposed to cultivate art and literature, protect free markets, and promotefree speech.83 Many scholars make a utilitarian argument for the origins of copyright by asserting that without copyrightprotection, authors, inventors, and composers would have noincentives to create works and distribute them to the public.84
Scholar William Patry, however, points out the limits of thisargument in the context of U.S. copyright law where the lawaffords protections for works that do not need incentives likeletters, business documents, and speeches.85
States enacted the original copyright law in the UnitedStates, but the Framers recognized the discrepancies among statelaws and urged for national copyright law during theConstitutional Convention.86 The issue of public performancerights arose in the context of music with an amendment to the1870 Copyright Act.87 When Congress wrote the 1909 CopyrightAct, it included the with the caveat thatthe public performance be “for profit.”