Stronger copyright protections increase prices
García et al. 20 (Kristelia García, University of Colorado Law School. James Hicks, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Justin McCrary, Columbia University Law School. “Copyright and Economic Viability: Evidence from the Music Industry” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Volume 17, Issue 4, 696–721, December 2020 Accessed 5/23/2024 https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1307) wtk
The extent of both the incentive effect and the costs of copyright are, in principle, empirically testable. On the question of cost, some attention has been paid to the effect of copyright on the availability and perceived quality of creative work. Exploiting the fact that works written before 1923 are in the public domain in the United States, Heald (2008, 2014) finds that copyright status is associated with a significant increase in the proportion of books that are out of print and functionally unavailable.8 Similarly, Reimers (2019) uses a regression discontinuity to identify the effect of copyrights on the price and availability of literature, and concludes that copyright results in higher prices (and fewer editions) for popular works, and lesser availability among low- and mediumquality works. Reimers draws a mixed picture of the welfare effects of this tradeoff, finding that, in this case, the decrease in consumer surplus from reduced access to lowerquality works was not offset by increased profits for owners of popular books.