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Originally Posted by petrucci
I will run the risk of being too broad, but the conclusion of these studies is that the availability of free content boosts sales of paper books. However, they did not find that this was true for every book that they studied. Some books' sales dropped by more than 30 percent as a result of being freely available online. Moreover, some of the studies state that such marketing may not continue to be effective in the future.
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First of all, none of these studies even addressed the public domain. Secondly, so what if it not every book showed an increase in sales? That's business, there are no guarantees. And if making books free as a promotional method might not work in the future, so what? They will change their marketing strategies if that happens. All this has nothing to do with the public domain.
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I would expect to see that the publishing industry tries to reign in free content. Similar actions have been taken by the movie industry with regard to Netflix and other formerly free providers.
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Netflix isn't free. The content owners aren't providing their content for free. If they decide that it isn't worth their while, they don't allow it to be on Netflix. Perhaps the publishing industry might stop promotional free e-books, perhaps not. But they can't do a thing about independent authors offering their works for free if they wish.
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In any case, trying to move back to the original topic, without copyright the publishing industry would lose a great amount of revenue. This would effect authors and result in fewer quality books being produced.
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Straw man. We're not arguing against copyright, but against eternal copyright. The impacts of eternal copyright is that obscure books would disappear entirely, and culture would be greatly diminished if people could not make derivative works of public domain works. If Cinderella was under copyright forever, no one would be able to reinterpret it. The public domain IS our culture.