[Hrafn]

Originally Posted by gmw

A monopoly is not necessarily a bad thing, it depends on other factors. Economics is a science of balances, it has few basic facts.

Except in the special case of a non-renewable resource (clearly not applicable here), monopolies are always a bad thing. This is why monopolies and market power tend to be subjected to government regulation. Sometimes however they are a necessary evil (e.g. because a market is a ntural monopoly, or as is the case here, because some sort monopoly is necessary to create investment).

One of those balances has been creating copyright monopolies. And remember that the monopoly in this case is only over the particular work, nothing wider (which, as you acknowledge, makes it quite different from patents and trademarks). So there are hundreds of thousands of tiny monopolies spread around many businesses and individuals, and this changes the dynamics considerably.

NO. The monopoly covers all works not covered by some 'copy left' license. This is why there are so much fewer books from after the lengthening of copyright available today compared to before it was lengthened. This is part of the dead-weight loss, and happens regardless of whether there is one big monopoly or thousands of small ones. In fact it could actually be worse under thousands of little ones, due to the search costs of finding which tiny monopoly to license from.

Read around, this is exactly what authors and publishers do. Each new book they create produces new interest in previously published works. Very few authors gain overnight success with their first book, most spend many years building their reputation and a back-list of books. (Many people have trouble with this because it is so foreign to our modern "must have profit this year" way of doing business, but this is the way it works.)

I take leave to doubt that, after two or more decades of writing, many authors are making a decisively significant proportion of their royalties from earlier decades. Any author whose earlier works are being re-released or kept-in-print after such a period is in all probability an author whose more recent works are garnering sufficient sales to warrant this, and these sales of recent works are likely to heavily dominate sales of earlier works. Yes, Stephen King's (for example) back catalog probably sells quite well, but in all likelihood the sales are nothing compared to those of his latest book.

To put it another way, to sell your back-catalog, you've got to keep yourself in public view, and the main way to do that is to publish a new book that sells quite well. But if you can do that, the question has to be do you really still need the monopoly on the earliest parts of your back catalog?