Copyright Is a Dead Letter for Negotiating With Publishers

When I was a baby writer and I talked to more experienced writers about copyright, nobody really understood it very well. But there were two problems with this theory. The first was that even though copyright might be a bargaining tool with your publisher, it's not a bargainingtool with your audience. And the other problem is that once publishers become sufficiently concentrated, then copyright becomes effectively a dead letter for helping you negotiate with them too. If we're going to keep copyright useful as a negotiating tool for creators, we have to keep the market open so that we can actually sell our copyright piecemeal to publishers who need us more than we need them.