Re: Creativity in non-copyright world

Albert Henderson <70244.1532[_at_]compuserve.com> wrote:
>
> The missing point has to do with investment. When art meant a single
> copy that satisfied a patron and an artist, copyright had little impact
> As reproduction technology developed, the right to copy implied an
> investment in copies and distribution. Now some art is created by
> teams organized by investors who are not patrons. If they are unable
> to recoup their total investment and make a profit from the small
> fraction of creativity that has a long life in the marketplace, they
> will invest elsewhere.

There may be evidence from some industries of investors making art-production decisions based on long-term payoff, but if so it needs to be documented. There are quite a few counterexamples. For example, the U.S. movie industry, currently a VERY capital-intensive art production industry, apparently makes its investment decisions based on expected short term (1-3 year) ROI, not based on expected ROI over the current length of the copyright term. So there's little evidence that the length of the term has much if any effect on investment in that industry.

Ditto the multimedia courseware industry, where the assumption is that the courseware product will be obsolete (though art and information in it may not be) in just a few years. In general, the horizon for investors in the computer industry and new media is quite short. The traditional rule for venture capitalists investing in a risky startup is "lose money at first, but turn a profit after 2 years." The rapid evolution of technology and difficulty of predicting the future make the longer term of copyright quite irrelevant in most cases.

There is arguably a different investment decision to be made when thinking about reprinting a work (e.g. a book) near the end of its copyright. Are there documented examples of publishers in fact dissuaded from reprinting because they know copyright is about to expire (and presumably some other publisher is expected to immediately compete by reprinting the now-PD work)? If so, it would be puzzling since the assumption is that the other publisher has made an economic decision that investment is worthwhile even without copyright protection!

To repeat a request I made a couple of months ago: are there any published scholarly economic analyses that examine the effect of copyright (particularly term) on production of IP?

JQ Johnson                      office: 115F Knight Library
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