Re: copyright expiration as a spur to creativity

The following post is based on my post of 3 Jun 1998 to the "a sad story" thread. Some of the points made there are relevant to this thread also.

For many of the years during which the transistor was under patent, its main use was in hearing aids. I don't know if AT&T ever made money on patent royalties from the transistor. Since the expiration of the patent on the transistor, and perhaps partly because of it, a whole solid-state world has been created in which AT&T has made a fortune many times over. But other factors are probably involved in addition to the patent's expiration, so the influence of the patent itself, positively during its lifetime or negatively due to the fact of its expration, is hard to sort out.

That copyrights can stifle creativity is a fact of experience for a number of biographers and historians. It's also a fact in the lives of summer theaters which can't afford to perform musicals. (Robert Kolker, "Theatres on Alert as Congress Looks at Copyright Law", Back Stage 36(9), March 3, 1995, p. 3) It's also a fact in the lives of community orchestras which now must now pay $600 to RENT the orchestral score of Prokofyev's "Peter and the Wolf" for two performances, when prior to its restoration to copyright under the URAA/GATT, the score could be BOUGHT for $70, which allowed unlimited performances and unlimited copying. But it's hard to prove how many musicals DON'T get performed, and how many orchestras choose NOT to perform "Peter and the Wolf" because of the rental fees. Even if the orchestra does pay the $600 the price of concert tickets might still not go up. Instead, the orchestra might forego doing some other piece, or forego hiring a guest soloist or guest conductor. The price of individual concerts stays the same, but over the long haul the public gets less for its money than if there were no copyright on P&tW. To the extent that copyright expiration removes these hidden costs, it can be said to lower the overall price of the arts and to stimulate creativity (since a performance is a creative act.)

One can argue that the copyright which puts "Peter and the Wolf" out of reach might stimulate an orchestra to research the public domain and bring some neglected work out of mothballs, or that copyright problems might encourage a historian to devote effort to a neglected historical question which is not plagued by copyright problems. But the fact that folk can adapt creatively to adversity doesn't mean it's good public policy to impose adversity to the thousandth generation.

Tim Phillips
<hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> Received on Tue Aug 04 1998 - 15:24:29 GMT