The price of a song ought to be equal to the marginal cost of distributing a new copy of a song. Which is to say that the marginal cost ought to be $0.
In a followup post on Wednesday, however, Yglesias took this point a step further. He argues that the entire infrastructure of intellectual property law is designed to bring the cost of all creative products down, eventually to zero, where it's best able to serve the most possible consumers; he cites the expiration date on the copyright of creative work as clear legal intent for all intellectual property to become free. He compares this to the reasoning behind expiration dates on patents for pharmaceuticals, so as to allow for cheaper generic drugs that improve lives for much less money while still providing a financial incentive to pursue new research.
This is a perniciously populist approach to how your information-market sausage gets made.
His example is wrong for two reasons.
One is in his misreading of the motivation behind various copyright and patent law expiration dates. Under current copyright law, a writer, musician or artist has claim over his or her intellectual property for their life plus 70 years. That's a pretty clear indicator that copyright law was designed not only for the artist to (hypothetically) have claims to the profit from a song for their entire life, but that their children and grandchildren should as well. The patent on brand-name drugs expires 20 years after the patent is granted. The wide difference suggests a clear intent as to who the beneficiary of these laws should be -- for drugs, it's a consumer; for art, it's the artist. This is why you can't sample P-Funk or the Beatles without taking out another mortgage, but you can get penicillin for pennies.
