I was responding to your retort, > the winners pay for the enormous number of losers. The original point from someone else way upthread was that the vast majo

I was responding to your retort, > the winners pay for the enormous number of losers. The original point from someone else way upthread was that the vast majority of revenue streams from published works, especially film and TV, are front-loaded. Yes, most works don't return much value; and, yes, the big winners cover the losers. But the context of this whole subthread is prospective marginal values of copyrights decades in the future (including windfalls in the distant future--I'm trying to strongman your argument) and the degree to which they incentive production of more content. Your original point (AFAICT) was that people ignore the prospective value of extended terms and its effect on pricing and incentives in the present. And my point was that the FPV of such marginal returns are de minimis, even taking as a given that they're positive and include huge windfalls. Your point makes most sense as a retort to people wishing to roll back copyrights to, say, 20 years or especially 0 years--i.e. only have the right of first publication. The more meta point is that we could argue hypotheticals all day, but what matters most of all is the quantifiable. Arguments from strong patent and copyright advocates are often analogous to, e.g., the shoe bomber hypothetical in security theater--yes, shoe bombers pose a hypothetical threat, and in fact a shoe bombing incident has even come to pass, but that alone doesn't necessarily justify the airport security regime established in response. To justify it we must look (as best we can) at the quantified costs + benefits, and then make judgements accordingly. So the fact that, hypothetically, marginal returns from copyright extending past 50+ years in the future might effect pricing regimes in the present--or even if we know they in fact do--doesn't resolve the question; it only begs the relevant question: does that value exceed the costs?