[Glynn Lunney] Abstract: In 1841, Lord Babington described copyright “as a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers.” In this article, I take that description literally. Treating copyright as a tax-and-subsidy system, I use a novel data set to estimate the amount of the copyright tax and to demonstrate that the copyright tax has increased significantly for books and music with the transition from analog to digital distribution. I then explore who pays it. Finally, I use the rise-and-fall of the sound recording copyright as a natural experiment to explore what, if anything, taxpayers have received in return for paying their copyright taxes.