> What happens when a competitor creates a substitute artwork (i.e. one that competes for market share with the original artwork) and sells it at 24¢?
Price and value aren't the same thing, that's part of the problem.
Suppose in response to competition the original artist would lower the price to 24c. The customer still gets the same value as before but is paying less. The customer gets 1c more of the surplus and the artist gets 1c less.
But the total surplus is still the same. The benefit the customer gets from having the art hasn't gone down, only the price.
Where this gets weird is displacement. Suppose competing art appears and now half the customers will choose the other art instead, and the customers only have time for one piece of art. Now the original art has lost half its total value because there are half as many people with it, regardless of what price was paid.
Which means it is possible to have "enough" art and more would be too much -- when you have so much that people are too busy with existing art for enough of them to choose the new art to justify its creation. But that point is well past what transaction costs will allow if payment has to be made per-customer via an ugly hack like copyright.
It may even be past the point where there is "too much" art/science/software, because you can justify over-producing a lot of junk if the result is even one more Andy Warhol or Albert Einstein or Alan Turing.
Price and value aren't the same thing, that's part of the problem.
Suppose in response to competition the original artist would lower the price to 24c. The customer still gets the same value as before but is paying less. The customer gets 1c more of the surplus and the artist gets 1c less.
But the total surplus is still the same. The benefit the customer gets from having the art hasn't gone down, only the price.
Where this gets weird is displacement. Suppose competing art appears and now half the customers will choose the other art instead, and the customers only have time for one piece of art. Now the original art has lost half its total value because there are half as many people with it, regardless of what price was paid.
Which means it is possible to have "enough" art and more would be too much -- when you have so much that people are too busy with existing art for enough of them to choose the new art to justify its creation. But that point is well past what transaction costs will allow if payment has to be made per-customer via an ugly hack like copyright.
It may even be past the point where there is "too much" art/science/software, because you can justify over-producing a lot of junk if the result is even one more Andy Warhol or Albert Einstein or Alan Turing.