--- Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 22:19:51 -0500 From: "Milton Mueller" <mueller@private> To: <politech@private>, <declan@private> Cc: <SSingleton@private>, <gbsohn@private> Subject: Re: [Politech] What's so bad about extending copyrights? Economistsweigh in [ip] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Disposition: inline It's sad to see Liebowitz and Margolis reduced to rationalizing blatant rent-seeking. Let me just deal with the most egregious logical fallacy in their argument. >Finally, we present data that counters a >common claim that copyright extension so far out in the future can have >little effect on creativity. The small fraction of books that have the >majority of commercial value when they are new appear to remain valuable >for periods of time that are consistent with the expanded term of copyright >under CTEA. A non sequitur. Shakespeare's works are valuable centuries after they were written. Does that mean that without a 500-year monopoly, they would never have been written? Was an extended copyright term necessary to induce him to write them? Obviously not, because there was no copyright at the time. With this rhetorical question in mind, one can see that Liebowitz and Margolis have confused two very distinct issues: 1) what economic incentives are required to _motivate_ and/or _reward_ creators of IP; 2) How long is a given copyrighted work economically valuable? The fact that a copyrighted work is valuable in perpetuity does not mean that one has a right to a perpetual government-enforced monopoly over copying it. The governmental legal protection comes with a (fair) price: the protection expires after a reasonable term. By confusing these two things, L&M are rationalizing rent-seeking by publishers. Longer terms do nothing to reward creators or stimulate more or better IP creation. This is proven by their own argument. Yes, in fact a very small amount of the IP products (say, 2%) account for (say, 90%) of the economic value. What they forgot is that no one knows which 2% of the works is going to be so valuable! Which means *all* of the IP that we have would be created regardless of whether the protection term was extended or not. One simply does not know which products have the long-lived value ex ante, only ex post. So it is only publishers seeking rents on existing valuable products, not creators seeking rewards or stimulants for creativity, who are interested in term extensions. Put more simply, longer copyright protection does not increase the chances that one will produce valuable work, nor does it increase the amount of work that will prove to be valuable for a long time. It only increases the rents received by those who happen to own products that the marketplace deems valuable on a ex post basis. A doctoral student of mine has just completed some empirical research that shows that longer copyright protection terms have zero relationship to the incentive to create. The only statistically significant relationship one can find is between how much money a person has received from royalties and how long they want the protection term to be. This reinforces the argument above. I can't wait for their next paper: L&M arguing that patent protection should be extended for 100 years. After all, that Edison patent on electricity generation is still pretty darn valuable. --MM _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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