Author(s)
Matthew J. Baker and Brendan Cunningham
Source
Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 61-82, 2009
Summary
This paper measures changes in copyright protection by comparing copyright applications with court/regulatory actions.
Policy Relevance
Intellectual property law is premised on the belief that it allows creators to earn additional revenues by providing them with the sole right to use or make copies of their work. This premise has almost never been tested. This work follows on the authors' previous work examining the impact of increased strength of copyright case law.
Main Points
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The authors use quarterly data on aggregate U.S. and Canadian copyright applications to estimate an empirical model of copyright applications. They also tabulated outcomes of important court cases and new statutes pertaining to copyright protection to measure changes it he breadth of copyright protection, then compared the two groups of data.
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The flow of copyrighted works exhibits a small but significant positive response to court decisions broadening copyright protection.
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Evidence suggests that the copyrighting of works:
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responds negatively to increases in registration fees
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moves counter-cyclically
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has a strong seasonal component and
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may increase as computing technology becomes more widely available
