Copyright and Generic Entry in Book Publishing: Comment
Abstract
This comment revisits Reimers (2019), which concludes that copyright protection for books reduces social welfare (abstracting from creative incentives) and raises prices. Using her model and data, I show that this welfare result is driven by mismeasurement: sales of dominant titles are substantially undercounted, while free downloads are overstated. I trace these discrepancies to data construction and market definition choices. Running corrected data through her structural model reverses the results-copyright protection increases rather than reduces welfare, with a larger magnitude than the original estimate. Restricting the price analysis to new books yields much smaller and statistically insignificant price effects.
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