US Public Affairs - 30/07/08

Against perpetual copyright

"Copyright is a monopoly property right that has always been strictly limited to a term of years. The mass of society has a tremendous interest in the public domain. Those who suggest eliminating the great social good of the public domain must show the greater positive benefits of wiping the public domain out, benefiting only distant heirs only of those artists whose works have any significance beyond roughly a century. Helprin has not. All he does is refer to the metaphorical similarity he imagines between intellectual and physical property. Copyright in the United States was created for one purpose only, as stated in the Constitution: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". To destroy the public domain would postively harm the progress of science and the useful arts, killing off all creativity based on others' older works, not to mention the huge public benefit to the world of being free to reprint and quote from older works without the gigantic hassles and accounting and transactions costs licensing negotiation with unascertainable groups of heirs. The great blow to the public interest of eliminating the public domain also would confer a benefit of value only to an infinitesmal handful of those artists whose works retain any value at all, a century or more after publication. Requiring the whole world to incur the enormous hassles of permissions and licensing to quote or copy, or create derivative works, of all old properties, would be an immensely costly burden imposed on the vast bulk of society, for the benefit a very few." [Lessig]

Economics of Copyright Collecting Societies by Christian Handke, Ruth Towse

"Economists have long recognised that copyright collecting societies (CCS), i.e. organisations that specialise on administering "copyrights held by a large number of owners", play a fundamental role in the copyright system. Indeed, the economic literature explains why without such organisations, copyright law would be ineffective in some markets for copyrighted works: the majority of authors and users would not be able to grant or obtain permission to use many works of art, literature, music, film and other such works that copyright law protects. In economic terms, CCS enable markets to function for the use of copyright works in situations in which the copyright holder cannot contract directly with the user. But because many markets for copyright works have changed rapidly over recent years, we should ask under which circumstances CCS would continue to play a constructive, maybe even essential, role. It has been argued many times that technical solutions to digital rights management (DRM) will render CCS obsolete as the market for copyrights shifts online and policy-makers such as the European Commission have begun to scrutinise the role played by CCS in the dynamic market for copyrighted media content online (REC 2005/737/EC). The purpose of this survey of the specialised economic literature is to take stock and to identify possible gaps in the understanding of the economics of CCS and to advocate attention to this literature in contemporary debates about them." [SSRN]