The Financial Times (sorry about registration and so on folks) is running a nice series of articles looking at intellectual property issues, written by this guy, James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Creative Commons board member and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He is evidently the opposite of Richard Epstein, which is good. Its nice to see the FT running some solid analysis of some tough issues.
This article looks at abuse of copyright law. I was particularly taken with this reference to Macauley…
Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.
Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.
Nice use of Long Tail economics, guy. Here’s a skewering of some of the “thinking” behind the current war on the commons.
Maximalism: The first thing to realize is that many decisions are driven by honest delusion, not corporate corruption. The delusion is maximalism: the more intellectual property rights we create, the more innovation. This is clearly wrong; rights raise the cost of innovation inputs (lines of code, gene sequences, data.) Do their monopolistic and anti-competitive effects outweigh their incentive effects? That’s the central question, but many of our decision makers seem never to have thought of.
I am happy to report i do have a pebble to throw though. Using the US database industry as an example of a good, in comparison to the situation in the EU? Unfettered transfer of information can lead to all kind of problems. I can’t see ChoicePoint, Experian or Lexis-Nexis (owned by Reed Elsevier) and other such companies as an unnalloyed good. On the contrary i think they need to be regulated, even if copyright is not the basis of doing so. There are some pretty terrifying aggregators out there. Its not all one way, but there is a dark side to data collection. There is also the fact Reed is a European company, but that’s a different story.
So idiots and opposites: not much change in this business eh? I know one thing- i am more closely aligned with Mr Boyle. I am not sure about his hat though; seems like Tim Bray has some competition in the jaunty hat angle stakes.
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