It's really not. Economics is very simple at its core. You tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities. The discovery of new information is a positive externality. It should be subsidized.
Anything that has infinite supply and zero marginal costs, as Nobel Prize winning economist Samuelson argues when he was looking at the context through lighthouses[0], should be free to all. By using copyright to make it a monopoly and allowing the extraction of monopoly rents you are drastically reducing the value and reach of the thing that was discovered. Copyright is a hack and this hack is now fundamentally breaking. Instead of trying to save the hack, we need a full rewrite. If winding back the duration of copyright is correct, the best winding back is zero.
As we are a remix culture where idea A and idea B combine to create idea C, we drastically reduce the innovation in our economy through reduced discoveries. This failure ends up with large monopoly holders consolidating into bigger and bigger entities in order to right some of this failure, but that only makes the monopoly extraction worse.
The discoverer should be subsidized for the discovery of that information but it should immediately go to the public domain. How you work out what that works out to is just as abstract as what Spotify works out what each play costs. This is no doubt monstrously complex to figure out the dollar number what some discovery is worth, but it is the economically correct path. Copyright isn't.
Anything that has infinite supply and zero marginal costs, as Nobel Prize winning economist Samuelson argues when he was looking at the context through lighthouses[0], should be free to all. By using copyright to make it a monopoly and allowing the extraction of monopoly rents you are drastically reducing the value and reach of the thing that was discovered. Copyright is a hack and this hack is now fundamentally breaking. Instead of trying to save the hack, we need a full rewrite. If winding back the duration of copyright is correct, the best winding back is zero.
As we are a remix culture where idea A and idea B combine to create idea C, we drastically reduce the innovation in our economy through reduced discoveries. This failure ends up with large monopoly holders consolidating into bigger and bigger entities in order to right some of this failure, but that only makes the monopoly extraction worse.
The discoverer should be subsidized for the discovery of that information but it should immediately go to the public domain. How you work out what that works out to is just as abstract as what Spotify works out what each play costs. This is no doubt monstrously complex to figure out the dollar number what some discovery is worth, but it is the economically correct path. Copyright isn't.
[0]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph