indessed roscivs

I am not a copyright abolitionist per se—that is to say, I don’t necessarily think that the optimal state for society is one with no copyright protections at all. However, I do believe that abolishing copyright would be more optimal than the state we are in today, where copyrights last 70 years past the author’s death.

First, let’s make sure we’re in agreement on what copyright is: a monopoly (primarily) on the right to duplicate a work. The US Constitution declares what the purpose of copyright should be: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”.

There are definitely some benefits to copyright, both to society and individuals. On an individual basis, copyright allows a way for a person to make a living from creative endeavors by charging for copies of their work (which otherwise would have a marginal cost of near zero). On a societal basis, we get more creative works produced because of the individual benefit.

I do not consider the individual benefit to be in any way the goal of copyright—it is only desirable inasmuch as it benefits society as a whole. If we enrich the individual at the expense of society, copyright has failed. If the total number of good creative works produced goes down, copyright is not doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

There are also some costs to copyright. The most obvious is the cost of enforcement—government agencies, private lawyers, groups like the BSA. The other obvious cost is that to purchasers of copyrighted works—the fifteen bucks I spend on a music CD is money I could have spent elsewhere had copyright not been in existence. A less obvious cost is to those who cannot afford to pay for the copyrighted works and must go without (or risk fines and legal action).

Another commonly overlooked cost is the decrease in derivative works—far fewer derivative works are created because of the licensing costs involved. This applied both to individuals on a small scale—such as unlicensed “fan fiction” authors who may write prolifically but can never put their name on their work for fear of lawsuits—as well as to large corporations—Disney makes most of its movies based on stories in the public domain or original works, rather than basing movies on popular copyrighted works, due at least in part to the licensing costs associated with the latter.

I see the tradeoffs of copyright as being most usefully represented as a graph, where the X axis represents the length and scope of copyright protections, and the Y axis represents the number and quality of creative works being published.

Naturally the graph isn’t linear–you get a much larger increase in Y when you go from X=0 to X=1 than you do going from X=99 to X=100. But Y certainly isn’t zero when X=0 (the false idea that copyright is necessary for innovation), but also I don’t think that Y is constant for all values of X (the false idea that copyright doesn’t affect invention and innovation at all).

The “sweet spot”—the length of copyright that I think is optimal—is when you take a look at the cost to society of X, compare it to the benefit to society of Y, and maximize the result: in other words, max(B(Y) - C(X)). Where is that sweet spot? I’m not sure. Some people think it’s as long as twenty or thirty years. I’m pretty sure it’s less than ten in today’s world, and very plausibly zero.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 10:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.