Copying Is Not Stealing

Of course we don?t have such a conjurer. The good news, however, is that grocers and restaurateurs participate in a competitive environment. To return to another point where?Crain?s protestations aside?we appear to agree, what copyright does is provide a monopoly on sales of a product to the copyright holder. Monopolists, in their quest to maximize profits, behave differently from participants in competitive markets and set prices well above marginal production costs. This creates deadweight loss. There are customers who would derive some non-zero benefit from using the product, but the benefit would be smaller than the profit-maximizing sale price. To the extent that unauthorized copying helps such people get their hands on works, so-called ?piracy? is socially beneficial. This is all I?m claiming, and I think it should be an uncontroversial point. Given that it costs nothing to distribute an additional copy of a digital file, the socially optimal quantity of illicit copying is not zero, just as it would not be a boon to the world if nobody ever lent a book to a friend.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=052a93ecb37941b7f51329907666b4b7

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