Shortening copyright terms bolsters scientific discoveries and publications.

4.1 The founding fathers of the United States intentionally defined the purpose of the copyright law very narrowly as a policy tool to promote knowledge creation and learning. In this paper, we studied the impact of copyright term length on knowledge creation using agent based modeling. Needless to say, copyright law has a broad scope and applies to many subject matters from literary works to sound recording and architectural works. The scope of this research is limited to literary works and more specifically scientific publications. So the findings of this research should not be generalized to all types of copyrighted subject matters.

4.2 Generally speaking, the extension of copyright term hurts knowledge creation in most scenarios. The adverse effect of the extension is more prominent when scholars have to read and cite more articles before publishing new knowledge. Changes in short copyright terms, especially from open-access to limited copyright, have a large negative impact on knowledge creation. Additionally, the effect is more significant the more scholars there are in the field. When copyright does hinder knowledge creation, the extension of the copyright term hurts all scholars, including those that have access to copyrighted materials.

4.3 To make matters worse, it also seems that scholars will be incentivized to publish copyrighted papers, as those scholars that publish copyrighted papers systematically outperform those that do not. Thus, it seems that, in most circumstances, copyright law simultaneously promotes the publication of copyrighted articles while decreasing the overall knowledge production. Within the context of scientific publications, copyright law may be creating an academic version of the tragedy of the commons, where individual incentives and the public good are misaligned in a way that harms the public good (Hardin 1968).