Matt Yglesias has an interesting short post on copyright and the music industry. He writes:

WHAT IS COPYRIGHT FOR? Tyler Cowen correctly highlights the most important sentence from this article about the music industry’s travails: “While sales are down, more music is being produced and heard than ever before in history.” With regard to intellectual property policy, that’s all she wrote as far as I’m concerned. The purpose of the copyright system is to maximize the quantity of content being produced and consumed, not to maximize the profits of some specific set of companies. When we see evidence that the rise of digital distribution of music is impeding — rather than assisting — people’s efforts to listen to new music, then I’ll start worrying.

Me: Yglesias’s position is interesting in part because it’s refreshing to hear someone state frankly that they don’t care about intellectual property rights qua rights. I certainly agree that part of the purpose of copyright law is to disseminate “content.” And I suspect I’m more disdainful of “artists” who talk about how all they care about is getting their “message” out — until they stop getting royalty checks. And, as I’ve long argued, much of copyright law actually acts as censorship. Plagiarism is still speech, but I’m barred by law from copying someone else’s copyrighted work.

But surely part of the issue is also the right to benefit from the fruits of your labors. Copyright isn’t exactly the same thing as property right, but they’re very close cousins. You’d think that since Yglesias is in the first amendment business that he’d at least pay some lipservice to that point. I could Xerox The American Prospect and give it out for free to lots of people. Or NR could simply take all of TAP’s content and put it on our own server. That would increase the quantity of its distribution — the sole point of Copyright law according to Yglesias — but presumably the suits at TAP would object. The question is, would Matt have no problem with that — at least up until the point the American Prospect goes out of business?

(Note: I am crouched in the fetal position, terrified at the thought of all the email from the zillions of copyright lawyers who seem to be outnumbered only by engineers among our readers).