Glenn Reynolds points to a complaint at Strategypage about royalties on model kits:

For over half a century, kits have been sold that enable military history
buffs to assemble scale models of military ships, aircraft and vehicles. But
that era is coming to an end, as the manufacturers of the original equipment,
especially aircraft, are demanding high royalties (up to $40 per kit) from the
kit makers. Since most of these kits sell in small quantities (10-20,000) and
are priced at $15-30 (for plastic kits, wooden ones are about twice as much),
tacking on the royalty just prices the kit out of the market.

Now I have no problem believing that such activities might be going on. I am never surprised by stories of dumb behaviour in business (the point about free markets being that such behaviour gets punished, rapidly, which happens less in other systems….stupidity is ever present, how one deals with it being the important point) and the reason this is dumb behaviour is this:

These royalty demands grew out of the idea that corporations should maximize
“intellectual property” income.

You don’t have to be an economic genius to realise that putting the people paying for IP out of business is not really the best way to maximise IP income. You might, as it seems from the above story, need to be an Intellectual Property lawyer not to get it though. At least at first for:

Some of the vehicle manufacturers have noted the
problem, and have lowered their demands to a more reasonable level (a few
percent of the wholesale price of the kits).

Which leads us again to the conclusion that markets are self correcting, that being our trite economic truism of the day. The only way in which we could improve this, at least improve it for the next time, is to start making sure that lawyers get taught some basic economics in law school, which neatly brings us back to er, this guy.