Copyright came into existence when making copies was expensive, and in its very successful application until this century has remained expensive. Physical publishing of books is becoming cheaper all the time as a result of improvements in xerography but still the initial outlay in hardware required to achieve the lowest costs per page are still significant. Copyright in these situations encourage investment that mightn’t occur otherwise; not because copying is cheap for any unauthorized reprints but because it is expensive for the authorized ones and the publisher wants to assure a return on his investment before he makes a significant outlay in printing hardware. The same can be said for optical disks which are cheap individually but mass production requires the use of extremely expensive printing facilities. The marginal costs of an optical disc are almost nothing but the vast initial costs must be amortized over all optical discs in order for their manufacture to be profitable. A strong copyright regime made such investments easily warranted.

But what when copies are ephemeral and cheap? A bitstream costs nothing to produce. The internet is already being paid for in monthly subscriptions. In this regime of publishing the only costs are the marginal costs and there is no disincentive to original publication. Now copyright is purely a reward to the author for his work and not a means to maintain a strong publishing infrastructure. Given the weaker justification for copyright in an electronic medium doesn’t it make sense that copyrights themselves should be equally reduced power.