> This upfront investment is what copyright is made to reimburse so if it decreases, copyright shouldn’t reimburse as much.
No. Copyright exists for the effects of the works that would not have been created, not to 'reimburse upfront investments'. If that was the purpose of copyright, J. K. Rowling would have made a few hundred thousand pounds (the cost of a UK woman living at welfare level for a decade or two) and that would be it. And if that was the purpose of copyright, authors would not need to receive royalties at all nor control the rights; did no one buy it? That's fine, the point was to reimburse you and you get a check for whatever receipts you held onto while writing. There, you've been reimbursed for your upfront costs: Mission Accomplished?
Obviously, neither of those is the case nor should they be the case. The upfront investment has little to do with the optimal regime, and so rises or falls in it do not affect copyright much. It has to do with the tradeoff between the deadweight loss of no one but the author being able to use a work, the value of the counterfactual works to a global public (including the compound long-term returns), and the elasticity of creator response to stronger/weaker copyrights.
> This upfront investment is what copyright is made to reimburse so if it decreases, copyright shouldn’t reimburse as much.
No. Copyright exists for the effects of the works that would not have been created, not to 'reimburse upfront investments'. If that was the purpose of copyright, J. K. Rowling would have made a few hundred thousand pounds (the cost of a UK woman living at welfare level for a decade or two) and that would be it. And if that was the purpose of copyright, authors would not need to receive royalties at all nor control the rights; did no one buy it? That's fine, the point was to reimburse you and you get a check for whatever receipts you held onto while writing. There, you've been reimbursed for your upfront costs: Mission Accomplished?
Obviously, neither of those is the case nor should they be the case. The upfront investment has little to do with the optimal regime, and so rises or falls in it do not affect copyright much. It has to do with the tradeoff between the deadweight loss of no one but the author being able to use a work, the value of the counterfactual works to a global public (including the compound long-term returns), and the elasticity of creator response to stronger/weaker copyrights.