I am an author of four nonfiction books, so I have a definite stake in this. Take that for what it's worth. For each of my books, I had to invest a substantia

I am an author of four nonfiction books, so I have a definite stake in this. Take that for what it's worth. For each of my books, I had to invest a substantial amount of time to do research, plus the writing and editing itself, plus everything else that goes into having a book published with a traditional publisher. For instance: * Experimenting With Babies (Oct 2013): 34,200 words. 208 pages. 82 works cited in references. * Correlated (July 2014): 29,800 words. 210 pages. 1,123 lines of code across several programming languages to parse all of the data. * Experiments for Newlyweds (April 2019): 43,200 words. 276 pages. 95 works cited in references. * Experimenting With Kids (May 2020): 48,300 words. 272 pages. 86 works cited in references. I could not have written any of these books without the ability to get paid for that work. And my publisher could not have paid me for that work without the ability to sell that work with exclusivity for some period of time. Otherwise, any other publisher could undercut them and profit off of work they didn't produce or pay for. So although I understand the "information should be free" argument, we have to grapple with the fact that information is not free to produce, and it likely WILL NOT be produced if the people who would produce it decide not to because they need to devote their time to other activities that DO produce income. In a world without copyright, many of the creative works we currently enjoy simply would not exist. That said, I think the current length of copyright in the US is obscenely long. If we were to make it much shorter (say 50 years total) I don't think it would have any effect on 99.9% of copyright holders.