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...

I googled "ebook library" and was happily surprised to see the number of sites available. These are books you can download for free, some of them for a limited time and others indefinitely, some still covered by copyright, but others not.

Ebook publisher Harper-Collins sees this as a threat to its business and so wants to limit the number of times an ebook can be lent out link here. Mike Masnick at Techdirt observes, "two of the big publishers -- Macmillan and Simon & Schuster -- don't allow any lending of ebooks, which is unquestionably worse." He thinks such publishers will simply lose business in a publishing world that is becoming increasingly digital.

I suspect we will end up in a divided world, one part with cheap or free e books and another with expensive ones with sharply limited use. Nor would I count on big business being unable to get legislative changes that further limits user rights, all in the name of protecting authors but really to protect copyright owners who by then will be mostly "publishers". Competition might provide a better outcome, but it hasn't stopped cartels in other business lines. For the moment, however, the news is good.

A hopeful story about monopoly under attack is by Julian Fisher, MD whose piece entitled Read This Academic Journal Article, but Prepare to Pay looks at the outlandishly high cost of medical journal reprints and more broadly, of scholarly journals link here.

He asks why the journals in all disciplines are so expensive and demolishes the argument that their costs are high. Authors are not paid by the publication, and the editor, normally a prestigious academic, works only for the honor. The journals ask $20-50 for reprints or require expensive subscriptions and there are lots of journals. In a limited breakthrough, "the National Institutes of Health now insists that the research they fund, when published, must be made available somewhere at no cost." Thus, that part of the government imposed monopoly has been broken. But the broad academic requirement for publication in one of those scholarly journals persists.

Fisher goes on to note, "The market has long been monopolized by mega-corporations making mega-bucks. But new business models abound. In the spirit of full disclosure, I started a not-for-profit to offer an alternative to the traditional models." That website is here

This interesting innovation is of interest to patients, doctors, and academics of all persuasions. It has been slow in coming, but there are other opportunities as well. One is the cost of textbooks. I note the price of N. Gregory Mankiw's recent rewrite of his basic economics text, Principles of Economics, "on sale" at Amazon for $199.11 with free shipping, as against the list price of $238.95.

Ah, to be an academic monopolist with what amounts to a perpetual copyright.

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

This is usually attributed to Pablo Picasso, but I'm not sure he ever actually said it. It sure has been copied a lot!

http://mimiandeunice.com/

We economists are frequently accused of making too many assumptions. As a rule we look to evidence for our facts not to assumptions. Not so the rest of the world.

For the third time in less than a decade, courtesy of the Congress of the United States, a natural experiment is being carried out (as we write) to prove one can make money by publishing books that are not copyright protected. Said otherwise, that one does not need copyright to make money printing and selling books worthy of at least the paper they are printed upon.

A few days ago, the Congress of the United States released the report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Like all government documents, it can be downloaded for free here. It is also published by Public Affairs for $14.99. Obviously, you can find it at online bookstores for about half that price, and it seems to be SELLING pretty well (#412 in Amazon ranking of all books, when I last checked it).

The two previous experiments were, respectively, the report on 9/11 and the one on the invasion of Iraq. According to Amazon's ranking, they are currently selling less than AIM (:-)) but they are still selling copies after a few million ones were sold or downloaded when they were first circulated. No, we have not made the 1M number ... yet!

If you want to see how broad and deep the "copying" business has become, you need to take a look at Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix link here. Part 1 considers music, Part 2 looks at movies like the James Bond series, and Part 3 and 4 have yet to be produced. The point of this is how hard it has become to justify copyright as applied to music and stories. Look at the Vimeos to see how compelling the argument is. The material is highly entertaining as well.