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5 Rev. Econ. Rsch. on Copyright Issues 1 (2008)

handle is hein.journals/rvwoecrh5 and id is 1 raw text is: Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, 2008, vol. 5(1), pp. 1-22 THE ECONOMICS OF COPYRIGHT LAW: A STOCKTAKE OF THE LITERATURE RUTH TOWSE, CHRISTIAN HANDKE AND PAUL STEPAN ABSTRACT. This article is a survey of publications by economists writing on copyright law. It begins with a general overview of how economists analyse these questions; the distinction is made between the economics of copying and the economic aspects of copyright law as analysed in law and econom- ics. It then continues with sections on research on the effects of copying and downloading and the effects of unauthorised use ('piracy') and ends with an overall evaluation of the economics of copyright in the light of recent technolog- ical changes. Economists have always been, and still are, somewhat sceptical about copyright and question what alternatives there are to it. On balance, most accept the role of copyright law in the creative industries while urging caution about its becoming too strong. And although European authors' rights are different in legal terms from the Anglo-American copyright, the economic analysis of these laws is essentially the same. 1. INTRODUCTION - THE EARLY LITERATURE For both lawyers and economists, copyright took second place in the analysis of intellectual property until at least the middle of the 20th century. Economists as early as Adam Smith commented here and there on copyright but it was not until Arnold Plant's 1934 article that there was a systematic analysis of copyright that could be called 'economics of copyright'. There followed a small literature on what we would now call the economics of copying - articles by Hurt and Schuch- man (1966), Breyer (1970), Novos and Waldman (1984) and Johnson (1985). In this period, Liebowitz (1985) introduced the discussion on 'indirect appropriabil- ity', appropriating rewards through market means using price discrimination, which sparked a considerable subsequent literature, a theme that was revisited in a sym- posium in the Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues (2005, 2(1)). Law and economics, meanwhile began to analyse copyright in earnest with the seminal paper by Landes and Posner (1989) that comprehensively dealt with the economics of the various doctrines of copyright law - its scope, term and exceptions, such as fair use and works-for hire. In this article, we survey the development of the economics of copyright, adopting what we see as the main strands of economic thinking on the subject; we do not attempt to deal with the wider literature in law and economics on the subject.1 'This article is based on a report on the economic aspects of copyright law commissioned in 2006 by the SGAE (the Spanish collecting society for authors' rights) and Fundaci6n Autor. A specific feature of this report was that it included a survey of European literature on authors' rights. Interestingly, research (by economists from France, Germany, Italy and Spain) revealed that almost all the academic writing on the subject by economists in these countries was published in English language publications. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1227762

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