[PostOnce]

If I refuse to make it available (commercially or otherwise)? Absolutely. Copyright exists to incentivize production and distribution.

I can see it argued that, being less critical than medicine, perhaps a book or software could be "out of print" for longer than medicine being out of production before the copyright protection ceases, but ultimately the only reason we have copyright to begin with is too encourage people to create and make available.

So yes, by all means. Make orphaned and out of production works publicly available.

[anovikov]

You mean - on a permanent basis? Everyone knows that poor availability of GLP-1 medicines in the past were because of difficulties scaling production to match demand that unexpectedly proved insane. No one was ever intentionally withholding them. It was a temporary problem and it is now solved.

[PostOnce]

I do think medicine is a special category because people need it, whereas if there is a 36 month gap between a novel's first printing and second, I (being the radical copyright reform advocate I consider myself) wouldn't think we need an exception to allow other publishers to publish it during that window, as with medicine.

I do think that at some point that window is long enough that the author and publisher lose any logical justification for keeping something unavailable while the rest of us subsidize their ability (via courts, laws, and police) to do so. After all, if we're paying for that stuff, what are we getting in return?

[anovikov]

Maybe we should look at it differently. If there was no patenting, only way to create drugs will be know-how: just keep contents secret and there will be no copy-catting. But that's not allowed: they can't sell drugs without telling the public what's in them, and assuring that the content and the effects of it have been thoroughly tested.