Joshua Gans, professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and author of the new book Information Wants to be Shared, discusses modern media economics, including how books, movies, music, and news will be supported in the future.
Gans argues that sharing enhances most information’s value. He also explains that the business models of traditional media companies, gatekeepers who have relied on scarcity and control, have collapsed in the face of new technologies. Equally important, he argues that sharing can revive moribund, threatened industries even as he examines platforms that have, almost accidentally, thrived in this new environment.
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Last week I attended an event on software patents at GW Law School. The event made me uncomfortable because it was—as one would expect at a law school event—dominated by lawyers. The concerns of the legal academics, practitioners, and lobbyists participating in the round table discussion were very different from those one would expect for a policy audience. For example, the participants agreed that there is no elegant way to partition software patents from other patents under current law and that current Supreme Court jurisprudence is unsophisticated, relying on the wrong sections of the U.S. Code.
Missing from the discussion was the single most important fact about patents: that they are negatively correlated with economic growth.
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Register here now for next Wednesday’s Cato book forum on Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas.
In the book, Ronald A. Cass and Keith Hylton reject the idea that changing technology undermines the case for intellectual property rights. They argue that making the work of inventors and creators free would be a costly mistake.
That cuts against the bulk of academic opinion today, which is critical of the broad scope and length of intellectual property protections today. The book has qualities that many libertarians will enjoy because it starts with first principles: the theoretical underpinnings and practical benefits of property rights.
By no means does the book answer all the questions, and we’ll have TLF’s own Jerry Brito, the editor of Copyright Unbalanced, on hand to provide commentary.
That’s Wednesday (3/20) at noon in the Cato Institute’s F.A. Hayek auditorium. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but the sandwiches provided afterwards come at the low cost of learning more dimensions of the intellectual property debate. Register now!
Joe Karaganis, vice president at The American Assembly at Columbia University, discusses the relationship between digital convergence and cultural production in the realm of online piracy.
Karaganis’s work at American Assembly arose from a frustration with the one-sided way in which industry research was framing the discourse around global copyright policy. He shares the results of Copy Culture in the US & Germany, a recent survey he helped conduct that distinguishes between attitudes towards piracy in the two countries. It found that nearly half of adults in the U.S. and Germany participate in a broad, informal “copy culture,” characterized by the copying, sharing, and downloading of music, movies, TV shows, and other digital media. And while citizens support laws against piracy, they don’t support outsized penalties.
Karaganis also discuses the new “six-strike” Copyright Alert System in the U.S., of which he is skeptical. He also talks about the politics of copyright reform and notes that there is a window of opportunity for the Republican Party to take up the issue before demography gives the advantage to the much younger Democratic Party.
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Ronald A. Cass, Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law, discusses his new book, Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas, which he co-authored with Boston University colleague Keith Hylton. Written as a primer for understanding intellectual property law and a defense of intellectual property, Laws of Creation explains the basis of IP and its justification.
According to Cass, not all would-be reformers share a similar guiding philosophy, distinguishing between those who support property rights but nevertheless have specific critiques of the intellectual property system as it currently stands, and reformers who do not see a place for property.
Cass explains that the current intellectual property system is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but is a matter of weighing tradeoffs. On the whole, he argues, intellectual property benefits society. Cass also argues that intellectual property law in the U.S. is still more functional than that in other countries, such as Italy, and that, while it would benefit from some reform, it is fundamentally a workable system.
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Brookings has a new report out by Jonathan Rothwell, José Lobo, Deborah Strumsky, and Mark Muro that “examines the importance of patents as a measure of invention to economic growth and explores why some areas are more inventive than others.” (p. 4) Since I doubt that non-molecule patents have a substantial effect on growth, I was curious to examine the paper’s methodology. So I skimmed through the study, which referred me to a technical appendix, which referred me to the authors’ working paper on SSRN.
The authors are basically regressing log output per worker on 10-year-lagged measures of patenting in a fixed effects model using metropolitan areas in the United States.
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In last week’s episode of Surprisingly Free, Tom Bell introduced his chapter in Copyright Unbalanced, a new book on the conservative and libertarian case for copyright reform, edited by Jerry Brito. This week, Geoff Manne, lecturer in law at Lewis & Clark Law School and Executive Director of the International Center for Law & Economics, explains how, while also working from libertarian principles, he arrived at a very different view of copyright than either Brito or Bell.
Taking an economic approach to property rights, Manne argues that there is a necessary tradeoff between incentive to create and widespread access. While Manne does recognize the value of widespread use, he says that its benefits must be weighed against the potential breakdown in specialization of labor and the value added by commercialization.
According to Manne, just because someone has exclusive rights to something, doesn’t mean that it won’t be optimally distributed, and, in fact, the highest value ownership right tends to transfer from the creator to the users over time.
Manne concludes that if the government can have any important role, it’s the creation and enforcement of property rights, including copyright, and that that may necessitate new copyright laws.
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Tom W. Bell, professor of law at Chapman University and author of the concluding essay in Copyright Unbalanced, a new book edited by Surprisingly Free’s own Jerry Brito, discusses the ways in which copyright has evolved over time and why reform is vital.
Bell differentiates copyright from other types of property, arguing that conflating the two terms causes great confusion amongst laypeople and, over time, corrodes the value placed in tangible property rights. According to Bell, copyright is a privilege created by statute that doesn’t exist in a state of nature and is not recognized by common law.
As a special type of economic good, copyright must be treated differently than tangible property rights, according to Bell, who outlines five proposals for copyright reform.
While Bell is not opposed to copyright, he argues that copyright enforcement has gone too far, and lawmakers should structure policies to lead us towards a world in which we conceivably do without it.
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Stan Liebowitz on copyright and incentivesStan Liebowitz, Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, discusses his paper, “Is Efficient Copyright a Reasonable Goal?” According to Leibowitz, economists could hypothetically calculate the exact copyright terms necessary to incentivize creators to make new works without allowing them to capture “rents,” or profits above the bare minimum necessary. However, he argues, efficiency might not be the best goal for copyright.
Liebowitz argues from a fairness or justice perspective that society should not favor an economically efficient copyright law, but one that treats creators of copyrighted works the same as workers in other types of industries. In other industries, he argues, workers are allowed to capture and keep rents.
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Christopher Sprigman, professor of law at the University of Virginia discusses his upcoming book the Knockoff Economy: How Imitation sparks Innovation co authored with Kal Raustiala. The book is an accessible look at how industries that do not have heavily enforced copyright law, such as the fashion and culinary industries, are still thriving and innovative. Sprigman explains how copyright was not able to be litigated heavily in these cases and what the results could teach us about what other industries that do have extensive copyright enforcement, such as the music and movie industries, could look like without it.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.