I recently finished reading Do Bad Things Happen When Works Enter the Public Domain? by Christopher J. Buccafusco. The paper looks at the various cases presented in favour of extensions of copyright terms. Buccafusco separates the arguments into three main ones, which he then goes on to discuss and ultimately invalidate.
The Under-Exploitation Hypothesis
The most prominent justification for term extension asserts that works become less available to consumers when they fall in to the public domain.
The "tragedy of the commons," whereby common ownership leads to the degradation of a shared resource, forms the basis of the second primary theoretical justification for preventing works from falling into the public domain.
The third rationale for extending copyright protection to already existing works is based on the fear that creative works will lose their value not through overuse but through misuse.
Using audio books as his case study, Buccafusco concludes that low quality derivatives of original works my harm the reputation of the original work but this is not exclusive to Public Domain works, nor does the works' Public Domain status significantly affect the resale prices.
Buccafusco admist that he is uncertain how this translates other media, such as film, movies or painting. To better illustrate, audio books act as an audio-based replica of a book. A song by DJ Shadow, for example, will sample only a part from many different works, not resue them in their entirety. How this affects the original work in this scenario was not covered in his research.
As a basis for arguments against extending copyright terms this serves as a very good study. I hope to use some of these arguments once I approach the various collections at the University of Birmingham.