Open Access publishers charge author fees in order to make their work freely available to the public. While I think most of these author fees are much too high given the low cost of publishing online, Sciyo appears to go even further and distribute royalties for article downloads to authors. The economic motivation seems to be a bit odd at first glance: why pay authors who generate higher bandwidth costs? I think the true motivation is to attract better papers that will generate more downloads and thus a better reputation for the involved journals. Also remarkable: this publisher already has among the lowest author fees in the industry (well, except for those who do not have author fees).

HT: Open Access News

Does filesharing reduce profits of the music industry? This paper claims so, and that should not be that much of a surprise. However, it also argues that filesharing is welfare improving because it leads to more competition and thus lower prices. Remember, ultimately it is the consumer that counts when computing a surplus, not just music industry profits.

HT: Economic Logic

The estate of jazz legend Chet Baker is suing Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada for piracy. These labels have massively used Chet Baker's works in compilations without any compensation, and they have already admitted doing so. The sought compensation is C$20,000 per infringement, which adds up to about C$60 billion.

HT: Toronto Star via BoingBoing

I just came across this older youtube video discussing a six-second drum loop from 1969 that became to basis of hip-hip and the subsequent genres based on sampling, the "Amen Break." The video shows how the lack of enforcement of copyrights allowed new genres to emerge and musical creativity to flourish. Of course, there is a company laying claim to a copyright at some point, of course unrelated to any involved artist.

Microsoft obtained yesterday patent 7,617,530, a "rights elevator":

Systems and/or methods are described that enable a user to elevate his or her rights. In one embodiment, these systems and/or methods present a user interface identifying an account having a right to permit a task in response to the task being prohibited based on a user's current account not having that right.

People familiar with UNIX or Linux recognize immediately the file rights management that is inherent in the security that these operating systems offer. In particular, the command line instruction sudo does exactly what this patent claims: it allows a user to see a file or run a command for which it has no privileges. The sudo command dates back to around 1980. The file rights management predates this by many years.

Is somebody asleep at the wheel at the US Patent Office?

File piracy is not limited to basement dwelling teenagers. According to an article in the The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, there are websites with a lively exchange of toll-gated articles from medical journals. People register and post request for articles by providing URLs. Good souls with subscriptions then post the requested PDFs. The article reports on an unnamed website with various discussion forums, some of which featured such requests. The author interprets the existence of such forums and the willingness of subscribers to help out as a clear signal that more open access to research is needed.

NB: The article reporting this is open access, no need to feel dirty when clicking on the link.

Economic Logic points out a paper that shows that shorter copyrights stimulate artistic creation. Indeed, copyrights mainly benefit the big stars among artists, and the monopoly power they gain is diverted toward promoting a select few. This discourages others to become artists and there are fewer and less diverse artists. Shorten copyrights, and you get more artistic creation.

This week is Open Access Week, a week to broaden awareness and understanding of open access to research. The idea is that as much of research is being funded by public money, it should be made available freely to everyone. With the advent of the Internet as a very inexpensive publication medium, it thus becomes possible to disseminate new research at near zero cost.

However, commercial publishers are to lose an important profit center if they were to grant free access to all their publications. They have been resisting any opening of their archive to non-subscribers. Some are experimenting with models where authors pay a flat fee for their article to be available in open access. The fees, however, are exorbitant and discourage authors. They do not need be so high.

The answer of some funding agencies, some academics and many librarians has been to push for open access mandates. A particularly prominent example is the NIH mandate. The idea is to mandate authors to deposit in institutional repositories whatever they publish. In most sciences, this is the only way to provide open access independently from publishers. In Economics and Physics, for example, there are decade-old initiatives collecting and disseminating pre- and post-prints.

Nevertheless, there are also a good number of open access journals, which face an uphill battle in getting a reputation similar to existing commercial ones, simply because OA journals are typically young. One of the goals of the Open Access week is to increase awareness about such publishing options, trigger interest in more open access mandates, and thus break the vicious cycle wherein researchers have to pay to access their own research. Talk to your colleagues about it.

Much has been said here about the disinformation pursued by the RIAA to convince each and everyone that illegal downloads are the sole reason behind poor sales. Turns out its British counterpart is up to the same standard along with its sidekick, the Ministry of Intellectual Property. Witness these two Guardian articles.

The first one discusses a claim that the revenue lost due to file sharing amounts to a tenth of GDP. It turns out numbers were off by a decimal. And then still overinflated by assuming each download had an opportunity cost of £25. And let us forget an argument about price elasticity and the difference between a price of £25 and £0.

The second one shows that the reason music sales went down is maybe due to the fact that there are better alternatives to music, like computer games and DVDs. Sales numbers would certainly be consistent with that.

The Economist is organizing an online debate about Copyright and wrongs. It starts today with opening statements and will continue for about a week. "Comments from the floor" are allowed, too, so there is opportunity to participate.