Copyright Notice: We don't think much of copyright, so you can do what you want with the content on this blog. Of
course we
are hungry
for publicity, so we would be pleased if you avoided plagiarism and gave us credit for what we have written. We
encourage you not to impose copyright restrictions on your "derivative" works, but we won't try to stop you. For the legally or statist minded,
you can consider yourself subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License.
John Diaz, editorial page editor at the San Francisco Chronicle weighs in on the censoring taking place from the overreach by copyright maximalists combined with fuzzy fair use guidelines.
"Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded," a compelling new documentary that critiques the portrayal of Asian women in U.S. visual media, has drawn protests from an unlikely quarter. It wasn't from Hollywood, which was deservedly scoured for its depiction of Asian women in films from "Rush Hour 2" to "Sex and the City." It wasn't from conservative commentators claiming political correctness run amok.
Instead, the objection to the documentary by Elaine Kim, a UC Berkeley professor of Asian American studies, emerged from six Asian American filmmakers just before its premiere last week at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Their complaint: that she used clips of their work without seeking their permission.
Yet there are some who still insist that the current copyright regime doesn't pose a censorship problem (or minimize the importance of censorship if it doesn't involve grievances directed at the government). Presumably, these critics would consider documentarian Elaine Kim a free speech "opportunist" in her criticism of the current copyright regime.
It has been over a decade before Napster effectively ended copyright for recorded music. Music sales are down. But did copyright encourage creation of new music? Has the quantity of new music suffered on account of the effective elimination of copyright? We now have a detailed study. From the abstract:
In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers' revenue but the surplus they derive from new music. The legal monopoly created by copyright is justified by its encouragement of the creation of new works, but there is little evidence on this relationship...We assemble a novel dataset on the number of high quality works released annually, since 1960, derived from retrospective critical assessments of music such best-of-the-decade lists. This allows a comparison of the quantity of new albums since Napster to 1) its pre-Napster level, 2) pre-Napster trends, and 3) a possible control, the volume of new songs since the iTunes Music Store's revitalization of the single. We find no evidence that changes since Napster have affected the quantity of new recorded music or artists coming to market.
It comes as no great surprise, but a court has thrown out the Google-publisher agreement on scanned books still under copyright. [link here If you are not a subscriber, you will face the NYTimes paywall but can access the article by putting the article's title, Judge Rejects Google's Deal to Digitize Books, into the Google search box.]
Though copyright is the law of the land, the finding holds back technological change that would have made all printed books available on line for a fee ranging from nothing to a modest sum. "…[C]iting copyright, antitrust and other concerns, Judge Denny Chin said that the settlement went too far. He said it would have granted Google a "de facto monopoly" and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners." Hilary Ware, managing counsel at Google, called the decision, "clearly disappointing," adding "The judge did expressly leave the door open for a revised settlement."
On a still more hopeful note, publishers' representatives indicated they would try to negotiate a revision of their agreement that would pass muster with the courts. Apparently, neither side will appeal the judge's decision.
This article says the only way to stop copyright piracy is to cut prices link here. It reports the results of a study called the Media Piracy Project published by the Social Science Research Council. This defines the problem in a somewhat limited way as it only looks at relatively poor countries where prices are the same as those in rich countries. For the poor, the pain of paying rich country prices is unacceptable and their consumers are willing to violate the law, even when they risk "three strikes and you're off the internet" or other penalties.
To charge lower prices in a neighboring country is to risk arbitrage and probable rejection by copyright owners. Thus none of us should expect any change in copyright moralizing about "thieves". Monopolist-economists would instead suggest maximizing revenue by continued price discrimination, probably on a less extreme scale. But please, no more moralizing.
From the consumers' point of view, competitive market prices would be better. But since copyright is a legal monopoly--of almost unlimited extent in practice--we seem to be stuck with it until public opinion shifts. That could happen when the public gives up GDP as the sole measure of the good and includes some measure of welfare.
David Andolfato has a nice post about Canadian "authors" and copyright. But especially look at the comments: according to Phil Koop the American Banker's Association has somehow managed to get exclusive rights to the numbers that identify securities...
