Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability

As a general rule, there are four elements to an innovative, growing economy. You need the freedom of individuals to choose, the reality of choices that can be made, transparency of data and accountability for choices. Whenever you make policy choices, you ought to be considering whether it positively or negatively affects freedom of choice, opportunities to choose, transparency and accountability.

Sometimes you have trade-offs between those four goals. What is necessary is the empirical data that let's you know to what degree your intended policy actually achieves the stated goals and whether there are any unintended consequences.

One of the long running debates is about the philosophy, morality and economics of copyright law. There are several difficult to reconcile philosophical issues.

As a bedrock principle, people are instinctively sympathetic to the argument that what you create is yours to be disposed of as you wish. If you build a table or house, it is yours to use or sell for the duration of your life and through your estate. It is a position easily transferred to the arena of intellectual property as opposed to real property. You write a book and publish it. It represents an investment on your part from which you expect to derive compensation and therefore people ought not be permitted to acquire your work product without compensating you. This is the genesis of copyright law. Over the past few decades though, the issue has been clouded as the ease and cheapness of copying has reduced the expected consequences to theft.

It is indisputable that the publishing industry, in part as defensive strategy and in part as rent seeking, has responded by attempting to both increase the duration of copyright ownership and increase the penalties for breaking copyright.

These are not easy waters to navigate either in terms of socially perceived fairness, philosophy or law.

Regardless of how and why we have arrived at the current state, it is usually helpful to understand what the consequences have been.

Paul J. Heald tries to answer that question in How Copyright Makes Books and Music Disappear (and How Secondary Liability Rules Help Resurrect Old Songs). Brian Doherty discusses the paper in Disappearing Books: Copyright’s costs

Regardless of the law and the intentions and the philosophy, the actual consequences are not particularly desirable for anyone.

Defenders of lengthy copyright terms claim creative works need owners to stay available. But Heald, using random samples of thousands of books available on Amazon, found that “copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability.…More than three times as many new fiction books originally published in the 1850s are for sale by Amazon [as new books] than books from the 1950s,” although that earlier decade had far fewer total books published.