"Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release? In some cases, no doubt. But when the baseline is that we already have free, completely legal access to every great album, film, or novel produced before the mid-80s—more than any human being could realistically watch, read, or listen to in a lifetime—I wouldn’t be surprised if our consumption patterns became a good deal less neophilic, or at the very least, prices on new releases had to drop substantially to remain competitive."
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Julian Sanchez with an alternate hypothesis for why we have such ridiculously long copyright terms. (via marathonpacks)
Counterpoint: If that were the case — consumption patterns changed because of increased legal access to existing canon — prices on new releases could actually rise. People will always pay to watch/hear/read something as it is being consumed for the first time by other people too, but if the amount of free competition increased, the quality of new releases would have to increase to stand out from the existing works. There would be fewer new movies and books, maybe, but the time that went into making them stand out, along with the fact that people in this hypothetical situation are making fewer aggregate purchases, means that people would be willing to shell out more for a quality product.
If you could watch every movie made before 1984 for free, wouldn’t you still want to see The Dark Knight Rises? For $18 in theaters?
