precious than money, so government's responsibility to spend our freedom wisely and frugally is even greater than its responsibility to spend our money thus. Governments must never put the publishers' interests on a par with the public's freedom. Not "balance" but "trade-off" The idea of balancing the readers' interests against the publishers' is the wrong way to judge copyright policy, but there are indeed two interests to be weighed: two interests of the readers . Readers have an interest in their own freedom in using published works; depending on circumstances, they may also have an interest in encouraging publication through some kind of incentive system. The word "balance," in discussions of copyright, has come to stand as shorthand for the idea of "striking a balance" between the readers and the publishers. Therefore, to use the word "balance" in regard to the readers' two interests would be confusing. We need another term. In general, when one party has two goals that partly conflict, and cannot completely achieve both of them, we call this a "trade-off." Therefore, rather than speaking of "striking the right balance" between parties, we should speak of "finding the right trade-off between spending our freedom and keeping it." The second error: maximizing one output The second mistake in copyright policy consists of adopting the goal of maximizing -- not just increasing -- the number of published works. The erroneous concept of "striking a balance" elevated the publishers to parity with the readers; this second error places them far