This is way too short. For example: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is currently #52 on Amazons top sellers list and has been in the top 100 for 1500 days now. I don't know what the best time for copyright protection is, but 2-3 years isn't it.
The original term of copyright was 14 years, with one extension. This has grown to the current ~105 years.
Economic present-value analysis shows that the present value of an additional year of copyright past a couple of decades is virtually nil. As an incentive to create NEW works, global copyright extension makes zero sense. This argument hasn't been tested by SCOTUS, though Lawrence Lessig has stated that he might have done better in Eldred v. Ashcroft if he'd made that argument rather than claiming continued extensions violated the "for limited terms" Constitutional clause.
7HOHEP was published in 1989, giving it a 22 year life to date. Frankly, I don't think it's all that outstanding, but that's another story.
This is a much more complex question, and I'd argue the answer is probably yes, even if copyright was as short as 2-3 years. The writer of '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' didn't know ahead of time that it would become a perennially popular international bestseller, so the potential revenue from 50+ years of copyright protection likely played a small role in his motivation.
No it wouldn't. It wouldn't be available from any source, because it would never get written at all. There's only so much time people are willing to put into an unpaid hobby.
Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Sincerely, Louis C.K.
I doubt anyone would be buying music if Napster hadn't been shut down.
Did you actually use Napster during its heyday? Of all the P2P software I've ever tried, it was probably the worst--or perhaps just the one most poorly suited to casual piracy. The search system was a joke. Even when your search turned up results, it was hit or miss whether they were actually what you were looking for. My favorite example was a file named "Beethoven's 9th symphony - by Mozart" (it was actually a Handel piece).
Now it's easy to find private torrent trackers with huge, well-maintained collections in very high quality. Comments and ratings make it easy to decide which of several versions to download, and moderators will even help look for rare files if someone can't find what they want.
I think the death of Napster was a big favor to pirates everywhere.
You simply typed in what you wanted, waited for the search to finish and clicked to download rather than found an indexing site, selected a torrent based on "seeds" and "peers" and then worried about things like magnet links.
Many people who are not tech savvy and want to pirate either get their friends to do it for them or are still using kazaa and friends.
If you were somebody creating lowest common denominator entertainment for an unemployed mother to put their kids in front of do you think you would get the same results?