Iconoclasts Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis revisit the economists' brief against the Sonny Bono copyright extension. They argue that the economists may be wrong, based on hypotheticals.

First, copyright extension for already-created works, although it does not affect the incentive to create those works, might improve the "management" of such works. For example, a copyright owner will keep people from debasing the work. However, that argument could be used to justify almost anything, including giving Bill Gates a copyright on the alphabet. After all, we might debase the alphabet, so why not give somebody copyright control over it?

Second, the fact that copyright extension can confer only minimal present value to creators might be offset by a high "elasticity of creation," meaning that a small increase in returns might stimulate more creative works. Yeah, it might. But in practice the elasticity of creation is probably pretty low--it does not take much incentive to get people to create, particularly if they already capture many years' copyright value.

I'm not persuaded by this article.