Who else will lose?
There will be many places where existing business processes break down in ways that allow copyright owners to extract new rents. For example, I recently applied for planning permission to turn some agricultural land that we own into garden; to do this, we needed to supply our local government with six copies of a 1:1250 map of the field. In the old days, everyone just got a map from the local library and photocopied it. Now, the maps are on a server in the library, with copyright control, and you can get a maximum of four copies of any one sheet. For an individual, that’s easy enough to circumvent: buy four copies today and send a friend along tomorrow for the extra two. But businesses that use a lot of maps will end up paying more money to the map companies. This may be a small problem; mutiply it a thousandfold to get some idea of the effect on the overall economy. The net transfers of income and wealth are likely, once more, to be from small firms to large and from new firms to old.
There will be many places where existing business processes break down in ways that allow copyright owners to extract new rents. For example, I recently applied for planning permission to turn some agricultural land that we own into garden; to do this, we needed to supply our local government with six copies of a 1:1250 map of the field. In the old days, everyone just got a map from the local library and photocopied it. Now, the maps are on a server in the library, with copyright control, and you can get a maximum of four copies of any one sheet. For an individual, that’s easy enough to circumvent: buy four copies today and send a friend along tomorrow for the extra two. But businesses that use a lot of maps will end up paying more money to the map companies. This may be a small problem; mutiply it a thousandfold to get some idea of the effect on the overall economy. The net transfers of income and wealth are likely, once more, to be from small firms to large and from new firms to old.
