Copyright Protection - Who Does It Help?

Great piece by Ezra Klein on the fashion industry and the cost/benefit of extending copyright protections (link).  Here is a quote that captures the nub of the issue:

And companies love copyright. They love it so much they persuaded Congress to pass the Sonny Bono Act, which extended individual copyright protections to the life of the author, plus another 70 years; and corporate copyrights to 120 years from creation, or 95 years from publication, whichever is earlier. That’s an absurdly long time, and it belies the original point of patents: does anyone seriously believe that a 40-year-old with a money-making idea is going to hold back because someone can mimic it 20 years after he dies?


At a certain point, copyrights stop protecting innovation and begin protecting profits. They scare off future inventors who want to take a 60-year-old idea and use it as the foundation to build something new and interesting. That’s the difficulty of copyrights, patents, and other forms of intellectual protection. Too little, and the first innovation won’t happen. Too much, and the second innovation—the one relying on the first—will be stanched.


Which is why we have to be careful when one industry or another demands more copyright protection for itself. “Intellectual property is legalized monopoly,” says James Boyle, a professor at Duke Law School. “And like any monopoly, its tendency is to raise prices and diminish availability. We should have a high burden of proof for whether it’s necessary."

I'm going to add one more concept in here.  Monopolies are really just a way to collect rents.  Effectively, you don't have to do anything of value other than allow the use of your property in order to collect income.  The hard part is protecting that monopoly.  And the way to do that is politically.  You need to get some lawmakers on your side and you're off and running.  Is it any wonder that the copyright protections in this country are absurdly long, far longer than what would be required for to encourage content production?  The politicians running for office have a friend in the content owners who are seeking rents from their monopoly.  Disney is not #70 on the highest all-time 1989-2010 donor list (link) for fun.  They are protecting their rent.  Here's a link with more on rent seeking and its consequences.

If it was up to me, I'd reduce the protection significantly.  Life of author, plus seventy years goes from rent collection, to theft from society.

Do you mind if I take a copy of that?

Perhaps breaking copyright law is a good thing.  Here's Matthew Yglesias (link) quoting from the abstract of research studying the impact of file-sharing (Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas wrote the paper, here):

The advent of file sharing has considerably weakened effective copyright protection. Today, more than 60% of internet traffic consists of consumers sharing music, movies, books and games. Yet, despite the popularity of the new technology, file sharing has not undermined the incentives of authors to produce new works. We argue that the effect of file sharing has been muted for three reasons. (1) The cannibalization of sales that is due to file sharing is more modest than many observers assume. Empirical work suggests that in music, no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales is due to sharing. (2) File sharing increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices. The sale of more expensive complements has added to artists’ incomes. (3) In many creative industries, monetary incentives play a reduced role in motivating authors to remain creative. Data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. Since the advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply.

See, grabbing content from pirate bay is actually good for society.  I knew it.

Ack... I may end up buying a subscription to the NYT

I really like the free internet.  All the free news and analysis that you can read.  Links to the best sources.  All that.  Reading about the paywalls being formed has made me worried.  Will I eventually have to pay for this great stuff I've been getting for free?  I mean it hasn't happened yet.  And usually when I run into a paywall (Like the WSJ), you can do a google search on the article's headline and get a free full version being posted by somebody else (I have no idea how they aren't getting sued for stealing content).

But remember that the NYT announced that they would have a pay wall (link).  Maybe they'll back down if Murdoch's own play fails (link).  Maybe not.

But, I can get my news from other sources, right?  Well, Krugman's blog is part of the NYT.  And now, so will Nate Silver's (link).  Yikes.  If all the best web content gets put behind paywalls, big content will have forced my hand.  Again.

(Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan)

UPDATE:  Nate has his own take on this change on his blog (link).   I'm disappointed to hear that his posts will reduce in frequency over the next 9-10 weeks during his transition.  However, it's good to hear that he'll be up and running by September, just about the time that political news junkies like myself will be going completely nuts.

Big Content Win

This is pretty technical, but one easy way to understand it is that it means my brother-in-law is right: Selectable output control is going to go away.  Big content is actively looking for ways to close the 'analog' hole.  And based on this piece in Arc Technica, the hole just got smaller:

After almost two years of deliberation, the Federal Communications Commission has granted Hollywood and cable companies permission to shut down analog streams to HDTV equipped home theaters. The geek term for this is "selectable output control" (SOC)—until now forbidden by the FCC. The Motion Picture Association of America requested a waiver on the SOC ban in May of 2008, arguing that without it, Hollywood studios could not securely offer consumers pre-DVD released movies on television.

So, here's the deal: