Lengthy protections in the status quo exacerbate the worst effects of monopolization in the entertainment industry.
Garcia & McCrary 19 [Kristelia; an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School and Director of the Content Initiative at the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship; Justin; is the Paul J. Evanson professor of law at Columbia Law School, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; 2019; “A Reconsideration of Copyright’s Term”; Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2780]//kaviWaRu
Two of the most enduring arguments against a lengthy term of copyright are taken from the publishing industry. Specifically, they are based on conversations with, and testimonials from, booksellers themselves.
The intuition that the commercial lifespan of information goods is far shorter than copyright's term is not new. Perhaps the earliest such account can be found in a speech against a proposal for the extension of copyright given by Thomas Macaulay in the House of Commons on February 5, 1841:
[T]he evil effects of the monopoly are proportioned to the length of its duration. But the good effects for the sake of which we bear with the evil effects are by no means proportioned to the length of its duration. A monopoly of sixty years produces twice as much evil as a monopoly of thirty years, and thrice as much evil as a monopoly of twenty years. But it is by no means the fact that a posthumous monopoly of sixty years gives to an author thrice as much pleasure and thrice as strong a motive as a posthumous monopoly of twenty years. On the contrary, the difference is so small as to be hardly perceptible. We all know how faintly we are affected by the prospect of very distant advantages, even when they are advantages which we may reasonably hope that we shall ourselves enjoy. But an advantage that is to be enjoyed more than half a century after we are dead, by somebody, we know not by whom, perhaps by somebody unborn, by somebody utterly unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action. 84