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Originally Posted by Sil_liS
I wasn't talking about the case when the publisher owns the copyright, but publishers do have an innate characteristic as they are the ones who make copies.
Copyright law gives temporary monopoly to the author but the author doesn't make copies, so publishers end up enjoying the temporary monopoly which is why I say that copyright benefits the publishers.
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Copyright does benefit publishers in the sense that it gives them an incentive to publish at all. While I think most of us can agree that in most cases the most significant work is done by the author, a publisher adds (or at least use to be) a lot of value through editing, printing, distributing, promoting, etc. The publisher would have no incentive to either publish, or pay the author if such a limited monopoly didn't exist. The public domain books that are still published today are ones with a proven audience. A certain number of people will buy Sherlock Holmes stories regardless of how old they are.
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When copyright is extended it means that there are more works that publishers can have monopoly over, so the value of the work (i.e. how much a publisher is willing to pay the author) decreases so this hurts authors. This isn't immediately apparent if you think of it from the point of view of older works. Their authors had their works valued higher as copyright was shorter and there was less competition, and now simply get extra time to gather benefits. But the creation of new works will suffer.
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I think this argument is rather weak. Lets remember the vast majority of books are only commercially viable for a few years. Ebooks change the equation somewhat, but most books will be difficult if not impossible to find on book store shelves 5 years after they have been published and after they have gone out of print, they may never be printed again because they simply do not sell enough to justify the expense. Longer copyrights do benefit publishers and some authors, but only for a very small fraction of the works that are ever produced in the first place. The lions share of profits though are still made with new works.
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Bill