Legal scholarship on the economics of copyright has largely settled into a debate between two polar extremes. On one side are copyright "neoclassicists," who favor the expansion of copyright protection until it encompasses all of the present and future uses associated with a creative work, as well as reforms that facilitate price discrimination, on the grounds that innovation is best promoted if authors are able to appropriate as much of the value of their creation as possible. On the other side are copyright "minimalists," who favor limiting the number of uses contained within a copyright so that it provides only enough incentive for innovation and who are generally hostile toward reforms that facilitate price discrimination.

Despite the differences in their conclusions, both sides generally frame the arguments in largely economic terms. Indeed, both sides of the debate analyze copyright through the lens of public goods theory, which Paul Samuelson was among the first to analyze with mathematical rigor. A core policy implication of public goods theory is that markets tend to produce too few public goods and underutilize those that are produced. In the context of copyright, the economic analysis has focused almost entirely on the premise that not only are creative works nonrival in general, but also that any number of additional copies can be produced at zero marginal cost. In so doing, the current literature fails to capture the key economic features that give public goods their distinctive characteristics.