Copyright Pricing in India: The Dialectics of Access, Incentive, and Educational Policy

Abstract

The ever-increasing problems such as rampant shadows library, piracy, and deadweight loss in the contemporary world are suggesting towards an unfavorable copyright environment taking over our knowledge regime, and these problems shouldn’t be confused with an isolative action-based problem rather a broader reasoning must be assigned. Price-capping of scholarly works is often suggested as a response to these distortions. Yet such intervention does not operate without consequence. It alters existing incentive structures and introduces its own set of trade-offs. This paper therefore does not treat price regulation as a standalone solution. Instead, it focuses on the underlying balance between the author’s interest in making work accessible and the publisher’s incentive-driven role in determining the price of copyrighted scholarly material.