> Publishers would put out a book, it'd get popular then cut-rate copies would swamp the market. Copyright was done to protect the publisher from this sort of abuse (and secondarily the author, as the publisher was their only means of reaching an audience).
Stephen Breyer, the recently retired Supreme Court Justice, wrote an interesting article in 1970 back when he was a law professor about that, called "The Uneasy Case for Copyright".
In it he argued that cut-rate copies swamping the market did not actually happen historically. Books made most of their money fairly shortly after publication. Copying technology was slow enough that by the time someone could get copies made and distributed there wasn't much market left for the book anyway. (Also, there weren't huge booksellers with massive inventory, or book on demand services, further making it harder for a book to get much sales after the first printing).
Now copying technology is a lot faster, and we do have huge booksellers like Amazon and book on demand services and we have ebooks so there is pretty much no cost to keeping a book available indefinitely, and so most of Breyer's points are no longer applicable even if they were possibly correct in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries.
That doesn’t sound right. There was a thriving trade in unauthorized editions of American books in England and English books in America in the nineteenth century, since there was no mutually recognized copyright between the two countries and there was money to be made selling, e.g., Dickens’s novels in the U.S., especially if there wasn’t any need to pay the author. The ability to make photographic plates from printed material (a technology developed in the second half of the nineteenth century) also reduced the cost of typesetting.
Dickens is a pretty big outlier in sales longevity. The percentage of books that are still selling copies 100 years after they're published rounds to 0%.
Stephen Breyer, the recently retired Supreme Court Justice, wrote an interesting article in 1970 back when he was a law professor about that, called "The Uneasy Case for Copyright".
In it he argued that cut-rate copies swamping the market did not actually happen historically. Books made most of their money fairly shortly after publication. Copying technology was slow enough that by the time someone could get copies made and distributed there wasn't much market left for the book anyway. (Also, there weren't huge booksellers with massive inventory, or book on demand services, further making it harder for a book to get much sales after the first printing).
Now copying technology is a lot faster, and we do have huge booksellers like Amazon and book on demand services and we have ebooks so there is pretty much no cost to keeping a book available indefinitely, and so most of Breyer's points are no longer applicable even if they were possibly correct in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries.