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by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 495 days ago
> Even at a decade copyright, pretty much anybody who was going to buy the book and read it has already done so. It costs you virtually nothing in sales, and society benefits from the resulting movie.

If the movie can be made then the book can be printed and sold by any publisher, under the current system. It creates a race to the bottom on the price of the book as soon as the copyright duration is done. Perhaps extending "fair use" stuff could allow one and not the other.

1 comments

That race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It allows poor people to engage with culture. That's the tradeoff here. At some point copyright is protecting a tiny amount of profits for the author in exchange for locking people out of access.

Copyright is supposed to be a societal benefit, or there's little reason for society to spend money on enforcing it. That's where we currently are, and I think why there's such a strong reaction to copyright currently. We pay to protect the works and then we pay again to buy them. They become free when they're so culturally irrelevant that nobody wants them even for free. The costs of enforcement are socialized and the benefits are privatized.

At some point, copyright is going to have to provide more back to society or society will get tired of paying to enforce it.