I agree, but only because your argument actually cuts the other way. J. K. Rowlings' billions don't come out of nowhere, they come out of the pockets of other children's book authors whose works can't get shelf space because monster marketing behemoths like Harry Potter dominate the retail channels. Copyright isn't even incentivizing distribution anymore, it's incentivizing pure marketing. Is that really what we want to do as a society?
That's a very interesting point, I'd never seen that clearly before. Thanks.
> J. K. Rowlings' billions don't come out of nowhere, they come out of the pockets of other children's book authors whose works can't get shelf space because monster marketing behemoths like Harry Potter dominate the retail channels.
It seems to me that that can only be true if we could propose some other legislative system, under which readers would have spent the same billions, but now more evenly distributed among all the other authors. I can think of many systems with a weaker form of copyright, in which J.K. Rowling would have been less wealthy, but all the other authors would have earned less money as well.