One of the widgets I have on my Netvibes homepage is a box that allows me to keep certain searches running in multiple search engines, or of different kinds of content (blogs, websites, news sites, technorati -- whatever) and I keep it set to run a search for 'economics public domain copyright.' It always shows me a feed with half a dozen things in it from whatever site or search engine I have selected. I have to remember to change the search engine/type of content from time to time to cast a broader net. Today, the widget turned up this gem: Rightscom Projects: Public Domain in Europe.
I have been obsessing a bit lately about 2017 and what's going to happen when Disney pushes for another 20 year extension to the term of copyright. And most folks I talk to don't try to dissuade me from worrying about it, but 9 years is a long time. It seems quite likely that access to and use of public domain materials is going to be much easier over the next 10 years. Google Book Search, for example, makes public domain materials much more accessible. So do libraries acting on their own and in collaboration with other non-profits. And there's the Internet Archive (and used to be MS Live Search Books) and Project Gutenberg. So maybe all this data *is* going to start rolling in that shows how much value all that access and use really has, so that next time maybe those who want an extension will have to justify their economic benefits against the public benefit, instead of everyone assuming that there isn't much public benefit other than the benefit an individual/massive corporate copyright owner gets from a longer term.
In the US we should have our own data stores that we could tap to develop this kind of evidence. It really sort of surprises me that Europe is ahead of us here. What with the author's rights/natural rights frame of reference there, I would have thought they might not see any downside to eternal copyrights (forever minus a day -- see below).
Rufus Pollock is one of the investigators on the project. I just recently learned about him because an article of his came to my attention (probably in the same way that this EC project did):
Pollock, R. (2008, February 16). Forever minus a day? Some theory and empirics of optimal copyright.
I've written about this subject a bit on my research blog,
Further, the same technical and market factors that will likely enable identification of and payments to authors and publishers for uses of their older works will also likely yield data that could demonstrate the relative values to them and to the public for access to and use of both their works and public domain works. These data may show that the public benefit from use of public domain works outweighs the monetary benefit to any particular author or even all authors combined. It will be a challenge to quantify the benefit to the public, but that’s precisely the reason to get started now, because these same data may make it easier to support economic theories of copyright that suggest that the longer terms are, the better (Yoo, 2007, p. 85-86).
Maybe I should just move to France for a couple of years, join their project and do research over there. I actually thought about Europe in the abstract, but had pretty much dismissed it (like I know a lot about European copyright -- no I don't). What a way to learn how to do research though.
Wake up!!
