indessed roscivs

Remember many months ago when I wrote a post called The Tradeoffs of Copyright?

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?

It turns out that a PhD student at Cambridge University has attempted to plug in some real numbers and see what comes out. Ars Technica reports:

He develops a set of equations focused specifically on the length of copyright and uses as much empirical data as possible to crunch the numbers. The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).

Interestingly enough, the original length of copyright terms when the United States was founded was 14 years (although renewable for another 14 years, for a total of 28). But over time we’ve been moving further and further away from that optimal number, closer and closer to forever minus one day.

(Rufus Pollock’s paper, full of equations and calculations, can be found in its entirety on his web site.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 11:09 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.