The unsalable warehouse full of stock would has to be paid for somehow, and it is paid for by the success stories. If we did not have the concept of copyright, bootleggers could wait until a particular book, CD or application was successful, and churn out thousands of copies, without much risk. There would be no incentive to publish. If you failed, you would be landed with the costs. If you succeeded, you would have your profits skimmed off by whoever was quick enough to copy your successful product.
Some costs obviously are unchanged, but others are radically reduced.
The key issue is how these changes relate to underlying assumptions behind copyright. Philip Machanick is at the Department of Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. When he is not causing trouble and telling other people who charge a lot of money for their opinions that they're wrong, he teaches computer science and does research in computer memory systems. He also edits an African bookstore . He is also president of the South African chapter of the IEEE Computer Society.