Agemegos
Over-educated dilettante
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It's because physical property is unavoidably scarce, and has to be rationed among competing uses. If I lived in a rented room, that room would not then be available for someone else to live in as well. So the optimal price of rental protperties (when a price system is the rationing mechanism in use) is above zero and will remain above zero unless and until homes become superabundant. Whereas the right to copy intellectual property is not physically scarce: we can make copies indefinitely without running out of the intellectual property. I can make a scanned copy of a book or drawing without thereby diminishing the ability of anyone else to do anything that they might want to do, except use the electric power I used up. The intellectual content of copies is non-rival in consumption and therefore its optimal price is zero. The artificial scarcity of copies that we create by copyright law is a kludge that was introduced by legislators to deal with the fact that the creation of originals is rival with other uses of scarce resources and therefore has a positive optimal price that cannot be paid by copies at their optimal price. In theory copies ought to be free and creators ought to be paid by the community out of the revenues of a non-distorting tax (such as a Georgic tax on land-rent, TristramEvans ), but the legislators decided that they didn't want to have the government decide what artists and writers to pay and how much and for what works, and didn't want to have to face their constituents over the taxes necessary, so they came up with this as a compromise. We pretend that copies are scarce, and deny them to people that we could allow them to without cost or loss to anyone, to raise revenues out of which to pay creators for their efforts (which are costly).So if someone owned a rental property, and died, should the rental property not pass to their children? Should they no longer gain income from the rent of that property? Why should intellectual property ownership expire on death, but not physical property?
Copyright is an abridgement of natural liberty that we tolerate because it funds the creation of fresh artistic, literary, and dramatic content. Once its job is done, i.e. after the creators have been sufficiently motivated, it is no longer worthwhile tolerating.
Both the market for originals and the market for copies are distorted, but it's probably not possible in practice to achieve the Pareto optimum in a market with non-rivalry, so near enough is good enough. While I'm in footnote mode, I'll add a comment that copyright was reasonably practical to administer while the copying process was capital-intense, i.e. while expensive specialised printing presses, concert halls, theatres, record presses, radio transmitters, movie print labs, projectors, and auditoriums etc. were needed to make copies (and expensive specialised museums and libraries to create viewing opportunities in large numbers, in the case of art and sculpture that copies are not made of, as such). Modern digital reproduction threatens to make the whole issue moot by de-centralising copying to the point where it becomes impractical to administer copyright.
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