> 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 copyright

> 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.