Open Access News

During the last 10 years there has been a frenzied and intensive debate about the desirable limits of intellectual property policy. For much of that time, if you said amazingly bland and banal things like: we should have balance, or it’s important to think about the inputs for creativity as well as protecting outputs, or we should not commoditize facts and ideas, you could be labeled as a communist, an anarchist, or, rather confusingly, both. So, what I think I’m going to do is produce a stunningly banal set of ideas....[The "internet threat" argument for tightening copyright protection] is not a dumb argument, but it is wrong. It’s not dumb in that there is a real problem. The Internet does lower the cost of copying, so it will magnify the amount of illicit copying. But it will also magnify the amount of licit copying. And it expands the size of the market, makes it easier for you to distribute things, lowers your advertising costs. On balance, are intellectual property holders better off or worse off? Well, even economists don’t think that you can decide that in the abstract. They say you actually need evidence, right? Here’s another remarkable thing about intellectual property policy over the last 10 or 15 years: it is almost evidence-free....[W]e have evidence [from the US and European experience with their different database laws] showing that less protection has been better for innovation than more protection. But you could spend days listening to arguments about database rights, and you’d never hear these facts mentioned. Additional evidence shows that publicly generated data turns out to spur more economic activity if provided at marginal cost --close to zero-- than if it is provided in order to recoup its cost of production. Europe puts into public weather-data generation about half of what we do in the US, and it gets a nice return of about a six- to eightfold boost in production. The US puts in twice as much, and gets back a 39-fold increase in production. Why? The information is initially provided for free, but a massive secondary industry --the private weather industry-- takes the publicly funded data and adds value to it. They employ more people, pay more taxes, and are an enormous portion of the economy....My points are: lowering copying costs brings benefits, as well as costs. And we need evidence before we make policy. Banal and boring, right?...It’s time to think about expanding the public domain, not just defending or salvaging it....What we have to do now is to think of all of the ways in which we can use the wonderful technology that is available to us, and build a public domain that people can get access to practically, but also a public domain they are aware of.