3 ms·

It’s great that the article starts with what’s right about copyrights. I also agree that copyrights last too long at the moment, they could be shortened a bit.

by dahart 5y ago

It’s great that the article starts with what’s right about copyrights. I also agree that copyrights last too long at the moment, they could be shortened a bit. > But this system has its limitations. I’ll highlight three that are particularly important: Intellectual property rights can result in fewer people enjoying the product than would be efficient. They can be expensive to determine and enforce. And they can ultimately create a kind of drag on the whole economy if too many of the economy’s rewards are for work that was done in the distant past. I like the 3rd reason, but don’t find the first two very compelling. We can make enforcement less expensive, having it be costly is a reason to make copyrights stronger, not a great reason to ditch the system. This is already happening in some ways online, sites like YouTube allow crowd-source reporting of breaches, for better or worse. Yes, it’s being abused and there are problems, but it is in fact cheaper than going to court. > The first-order consequences of online piracy are that you are better off, and nobody is worse off. Copyright law is specifically founded on the principle that this is not true, and it is why being sued for copyright breach explicitly does not depend on the creator making money on the thing being copied. (It helps if there’s clear financial damage, but is by no means necessary.) Coming from a site on economics, this assertion seems particularly troubling. Taking something of value without paying for it is still stealing, there is economic harm, and it’s irrelevant whether the creator is deprived of something tangible. Even the author acknowledges that if there were no copyrights, it would be economically damaging, and the entire reason why is because there is harm done when pirating, and we’re trying to balance that harm with the good. > We can ultimately reject an online piracy model, at least for some works, because we worry about the second-order incentive effects of creators not getting paid. But then we miss out on the good first-order consequences of distributing the work to anyone who wants it. Interesting framing that reverses first-order and second-order effect, again problematic from an economics perspective. Paying buyers of copies are the first-order primary economy for copies. What economic “first-order” good does distributing free copies to anyone who wants it do? I’m in favor of being able to incorporate and remix works after some time, but unlimited free copies immediately after creation would be first-order bad.

CRConrad 5y ago
> I like the 3rd reason, but don’t find the first two very compelling. We can make enforcement less expensive, having it be costly is a reason to make copyrights stronger, not a great reason to ditch the system. I think you're misunderstanding TFA there. The main thing they're talking about there is not the cost of enforcement (point 2), but the cost to society in terms of lost / unrealised economic surplus (point 1). Look at the first graph on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus : the blue line, producers' price as a function of unit cost, should in economic theory equal their marginal cost. The shape it has in this graph is typical for manufactured physical goods; it slopes upwards to the right. For "intellectual property", like books or films, it will be much closer to a horizontal line (once you've written the book / produced the movie, you can sell additional units at almost no additional cost; all additional revenue is almost purely profit). Sure, the blue area (producer surplus) may be smaller with a horizontal supply price line, but the point is that the total economic surplus (blue plus red area) would be much larger with a lower horizontal supply price line than with a higher one. The author's argument is that the monopoly granted by too-strict copyright terms allow suppliers to keep the price higher than would otherwise be the case, making the size of the whole surplus -- blue plus (admittedly, mostly) red areas -- smaller than it could (should) be. That is the true economic cost of too-strict copyright terms. At least that's how I understood their argument.

by dahart 5y ago

CRConrad 5y ago

> I like the 3rd reason, but don’t find the first two very compelling. We can make enforcement less expensive, having it be costly is a reason to make copyrights stronger, not a great reason to ditch the system. I think you're misunderstanding TFA there. The main thing they're talking about there is not the cost of enforcement (point 2), but the cost to society in terms of lost / unrealised economic surplus (point 1). Look at the first graph on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus : the blue line, producers' price as a function of unit cost, should in economic theory equal their marginal cost. The shape it has in this graph is typical for manufactured physical goods; it slopes upwards to the right. For "intellectual property", like books or films, it will be much closer to a horizontal line (once you've written the book / produced the movie, you can sell additional units at almost no additional cost; all additional revenue is almost purely profit). Sure, the blue area (producer surplus) may be smaller with a horizontal supply price line, but the point is that the total economic surplus (blue plus red area) would be much larger with a lower horizontal supply price line than with a higher one. The author's argument is that the monopoly granted by too-strict copyright terms allow suppliers to keep the price higher than would otherwise be the case, making the size of the whole surplus -- blue plus (admittedly, mostly) red areas -- smaller than it could (should) be. That is the true economic cost of too-strict copyright terms. At least that's how I understood their argument.