Copyright: A Plea for Empirical Research

Abstract

I review empirical research into the economic impact of copyright law.A key difficulty is that there is little systematic measurement of creative output and copying: there are only fragmentary statistics for the various industries.Studies of U.S. copyright registrations provide conflicting results: one shows that small changes in fees have large impacts on renewals, while another shows that many movies and books have long lives.All but one studies find that music piracy -whether conventional or digital -has hurt legitimate CD sales.Studies of extensions of copyright duration yield conflicting results: one focusing on U.S. registrations finds no effect, while a multi-country study finds that extensions are associated with substantial increases in movie production.I conclude with directions for future empirical research.

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