We have artificial scarcity of copies.

Many people could derive huge benefits (in the case of patented medicines, life!) if we hadn't artificially made the copies and drugs scarce.

Authorship is scarce, but copyrights only indirectly relate to authorship. They are an attempt to encourage authorship by restricting society. However, by banning derivative works, they also reduce authorship. By making copies an artificially scarce resource, they are derpiving society of most of the benefits of authorship.

There are other ways to give incentives for authorship besides depriving society of its benefits. Even if copyrights are applied, their application for hundreds of years is obscene. Empirically, many works of authorship got quite well funded without the support of copyrights.

That's a very short term analysis. Again, drugs don't just drop from the sky. Unless there's an alternative funding model, people copying drugs for free means the firm that did the R&D to make the drug goes bust, and won't invent future drugs that would save even more lives. Until the number of untreatable diseases tends to zero, making sure drug firms survive is a much higher long term priority than saving a few lives now.

>Authorship is scarce, but copyrights only indirectly relate to authorship. They are an attempt to encourage authorship by restricting society.

All laws are restrictions on society.

> However, by banning derivative works, they also reduce authorship.

No, it only bans unlicensed derivative work. See all the recent "Tom Clancy's XYZ" novels, or the new Bourne novels, or the entire plethora of Star Wars novels and animation. If you profit by building on the foundation laid by somebody else, don't they deserve a cut?

And heck, if someone really wants to author unlicensed derivative work, they can post to a fanfic site. If you've ever read fanfic, or heck, any amount of amateur work, you'd realize why any talent that we find worthwhile is so precious and should be nurtured.

> Empirically, many works of authorship got quite well funded without the support of copyrights.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but historically works got funded was through the means of patronship or commissions from rich people. Not a terribly scalable process.

Yes, we apply artificial scarcity to copies because authorship is scarce. But that's the best way we know how -- that's how economics has always worked. But until we've figured out a better way we should not just abandon a model that's worked pretty well so far.

Similarly, copyrights are discouraging authorship as well as encouraging it, and empirical evidence suggests the former factor may very well be stronger than the latter. So we might be paying the huge price of copyright restrictions for negative benefits.

> No, it only bans unlicensed derivative work

Requiring a license negotiation is a barrier so large, that it prevents virtually all derivative works. Most authors do not license any derivative works. Many creators of derivative works do not do so for a profit incentive. The cost of a license deal will often overwhelm the cost of creating the work itself.

In short, copyrights outright ban the vast majority of derivative works.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but historically works got funded was through the means of patronship or commissions from rich people. Not a terribly scalable process

Not only patronship. British authors did not enjoy copyrights in the early US, so they had struck deals with publishers for right to be the first to publish. They often made more money from these deals than from their copyright-based publishing.

Contemporary authorship of much software is funded without being based on copyrights (A lot of open-source companies).

Other contemporary authorship is funded by academia, and does not depend on copyrights.

The "9/11 commission report" was published without copyrights, and yet the publisher had profited at least millions of dollars from its publication.

> Yes, we apply artificial scarcity to copies because authorship is scarce. But that's the best way we know how -- that's how economics has always worked

Economics had always worked on reducing scarcity, not increasing it.

> But until we've figured out a better way we should not just abandon a model that's worked pretty well so far.

There's no reason at all to believe this system works well, as the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Consider that if today's copyright laws had existed in the time of Shakespeare, he would not be allowed to author his works without "licensing deals".

If we look at patents. It's working horribly. Literally millions of people are dying of curable diseases. 90% of drug funding comes from government, of which 85% goes to the pockets of the drug firms, and only 15% funds actual research!