The argument that this book is making (albeit not intentionally) is that copyright gets more and more expensive over time. As copying becomes easier you need mo

The argument that this book is making (albeit not intentionally) is that copyright gets more and more expensive over time. As copying becomes easier you need more and more intrusive regulations with increasingly draconian punishments to achieve the same effect. This is not an argument in favor of stronger copyrights; it is an argument that copyright is the wrong approach. It doesn't scale. There was a time where it was irrelevant because copying was too difficult to permit mass distribution. Once copying started to become easier it "worked" for a while, because copying still required significant effort and specialized equipment. It pretty much stopped working altogether—i.e., even imperfect enforcement costs society far more than it gains by subsidizing the creation of new creative works—once the effort became trivial and the equipment ubiquitous. It's long past time to let it go. > That approach is based on the idea that a free market is an optimal way to determine the allocation of resources and we should use it whenever we can. While "applying the free market to creative works" is a common justification for copyright, in fact the opposite is true. Instead of allowing the free market to operate in the labor of creating new works and the distribution of new and existing works we artificially restrict distribution to subsidize labor. Both areas suffer from misallocation of resources as a result. We waste huge amounts of labor creating minor variations on existing themes and (inefficiently) distributing them when what we already had would have been perfectly adequate if only we were allowed to distribute it freely.