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Comment by msabalau | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of copyright under the US Constitution, a text relevant to the courts the EFF is addressing here, is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving creators temporary exclusive rights to their works"

It is not to "compensate for the cost of production", nor is it to ensure that business plans of major music publishers happen to be successful.

The EFF is correct to say here that copyright shouldn't be perverted to limiting market competition generally, but limited to protecting a specific works.

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> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

In what ways does an exclusive right promote the progress of science and the useful arts other than by incentivizing that creative work?

In what way can that incentive work other than by compensating for the cost of production?

Why are you being argumentative? "Promote" and "exclusive rights" was always about compensation for the time and effort invested. You just rephrased what the OP said while claiming to disagree.

It's substantively different. The level of compensation you could expect from copyright needs to be high enough that creators/inventors in general feel that it may be worthwhile to create/invent stuff. That level of compensation may be exactly enough to pay for a musician to make a track. We know this is not the case, it's more like a lottery ticket; some musicians make millions (much more than would be needed to entice them to choose this line of work) and many make almost nothing, but still persist. If you relax copyright provisions so that average compensation is halved, this would presumably have a non-linear impact. Maybe a 50% decrease in expected compensation only results in -10% new works. Maybe in -80%. For example, it is completely implausible that retroactively extending copyright (as has been done) results in any additional works being created at all - just higher profits for existing owners. This also applies to the costs; a higher cost of production (e.g. cost of living) doesn't necessarily need to lead to more stringent copyright restraints, nor lower costs to more lax restrictions.

I don't get how what you said is different from what I said.

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