Against Intellectual Monopoly

estimated that
6.9 million copies of the report were (legally) downloaded over the Internet.
Competition, in short, was pretty fierce.

    Despite this fierce competition, the evidence suggests that Norton was
able to turn a profit. We do not know, unfortunately, how much it would
have paid up front to the "author" had the rights to go first been put out to
bid. But we do have some idea of how much it made after the fact. First, we
know that Norton sold about 1.1 million copies, and that it charged between
$1 and $1.50 more than St. Martin's did.18 Other publishers also estimated
that Norton made on the order of $1 of profit on each copy. Assuming that
St. Martin's has some idea of how to price a book to avoid losing money,
this suggests Norton made, at the very least, on the order of $1 million. We
also know that its contract with the government called upon the publisher
to donate its "profits" to charity - and we know that it did, in fact, "donate
$600,000 to support the study of emergency preparedness and terrorism
prevention."19 Because the entire Hollywood movie industry has managed
by creative accounting to avoid earning a profit during its entire history,
we can be forgiven if we suspect that Norton earned a bit more than the
$600,000 it admitted to.
    We have already mentioned that it took us a few years to revise this book
for final publication. The delay was probably bad for our reputation as
professional book writers, but the three years that passed between the first
draft and the revised edition allowed for a number of our wild conjectures
to be tested by facts. Just recently a second natural experiment, similar
to that of the 9-11 Commission Report, has taken place. The Iraq Study
Group, also known as the Baker-Hamilton Commission, was appointed on
March 15, 2006, by the U.S. Congress. Its task was to carry out a bipartisan
evaluation of the situation in Iraq following the United States-led invasion
and subsequent occupation, and to make policy recommendations about
how that dramatic situation could be improved.
    The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) provided support for the
Iraq Study Group, whose final report was released on the USIP Web site
on December 6, 2006, for free downloading. Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, published the same report and put it on sale at bookstores
and Internet sites around the world on the same day. We have been unable to find evidence of how much Vintage Books paid for the right to access the
manuscript before it was freely downloadable, but it is probably not zero.
Recall that the report cannot be copyrighted, and any other publisher may,
and probably will, get in on the fray without having to pay Vintage a single
penny. We checked the Web, and the book is widely available at prices that
range between about $9 and $11. It quickly made Amazon's top twenty-five
best sellers list and, on December 25, 2006 (the last day we have data for),
Amazon ranked it as No. 191 for total sales under the category "books,"
meaning among all books Amazon had available. Not bad for a document
that anyone can also download for free, in about thirty seconds, from the
UISP and many other Web sites.20

    What, then, do these facts mean for fiction without copyright? By way of
contrast to the 9-11 Commission Report, which was in paperback and, including free downloads, seems to have about 8 million copies in circulation, the
initial print run for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was reported to
be 10.8 million hardcover copies.21 So, we can realistically conclude that if
J. K. Rowling were forced to publish her book without the benefit of copyright, she might reasonably expect to sell the book to a publishing house
for several million dollars - or more. This is certainly quite a bit less money
than she earns under the current copyright regime. But it seems likely, given
her previous occupation as a part-time French teacher, that it would still
give her adequate incentive to produce her great works of literature.22
News Reporting
    The distribution of news on the Internet makes an interesting contrast to
the distribution of music. While the RIAA has used every imaginable legal
(and in some cases illegal) strategy to keep music off the Internet, the news
reporting industry has embraced the Internet. Most major news agencies
have a Web site where news stories may be viewed for, at most, the cost of
a free registration. Far from