Copyright Policy Research Articles

‘Isn’t it just a way to protect Walt Disney’s rights?’: Media user perspectives on copyright

With digitization allowing for faster and easier sharing and copying of media, the behaviour and attitudes of everyday users of copyrighted material have become an increasing focus of policy, industry and academic attention. This article connects historical characterizations of copyright infringement and the role of the public interest in the development of copyright law and policy with the complex experience of modern, ordinary users of digital media. Users are proposed not as transgressors to be educated, regulated or scared straight, nor as a hazy and largely silent public, but as sources of legitimate perspectives that could contribute to conversations about media, creativity and regulation.

Calling All Copyfighters: Experts as Superheroes, Comic Books as Intervention and Boundary Making in Canadian Copyright Policy

Critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992) provides collective action scholars with means to interpret the practices of media, and particularly activist media, in politically engaging and mobilizing publics. Claims that novel forms of digital media bypass obstacles of mainstream media and facilitate greater public participation in policy-making require empirical and theoretical assessment. This article scrutinizes one notable digital intervention in copyright policy-making: an interactive and “clickable” PDF comic, published by Appropriation Art, presenting a framed narrative surrounding the “Fair Copyright for Canada” campaign. Analyzing the comic's composition and its intertextual, interdiscursive, and performative character, the analysis shows it is related to institutionalized political and mainstream media practice and, contrary to intention, helps reproduce traditional institutional divides between policy “insiders” and “outsiders.”

Wikipedia's Economic Value

In the copyright policy debate, proponents of strong copyright protection tend to be dismissive of the quality of freely available content. In response to counter-examples such as open access scholarly publications and advertising-supported business models (e.g., newspaper websites and the over-the-air television broadcasts viewed by 50 million Americans), the strong copyright proponents center their attack on amateur content. In this narrative, YouTube is for cat videos and Wikipedia is a wildly unreliable source of information.Recent studies, however, indicate that the volunteer-written and -edited Wikipedia is no less reliable than professionally edited encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Moreover, Wikipedia has far broader coverage. Britannica, which discontinued its print edition in 2012 and now appears only online, contains 120,000 articles, all in English. Wikipedia, by contrast, has 4.3 million articles in English and a total of 22 million articles in 285 languages. Wikipedia attracts more than 470 million unique visitors a month who view over 19 billion pages. According to Alexa, it is the sixth most visited website in the world.Wikipedia, therefore, is a shining example of valuable content created by non-professionals. Is there a way to measure the economic value of this content? Because Wikipedia is created by volunteers, is administered by a non-profit foundation, and is distributed for free, the normal means of measuring value — such as revenue, market capitalization, and book value — do not directly apply. Nonetheless, there are a variety of methods for estimating its value in terms of its market value, its replacement cost, and the value it creates for its users. These methods suggest a valuation in the tens of billions of dollars, a one-time replacement cost of $6.6 billion with an annual updating cost of $630 million, and consumer benefit in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Research on the Copyright Policy for the Protection, Preservation and Utilization of Intangible Cultural Heritage

The Research on the Copyright Policy for the Protection, Preservation and Utilization of Intangible Cultural Heritage

CEO Compensation in Copyright-Intensive Industries

For the past six years, the CEOs of firms in copyright-intensive industries received significantly higher compensation than the CEOs of the firms in the other industries we used for comparison (construction, transportation, and mining). For example, in 2012, copyright-intensive industry CEOs received $22.9 million on average in compensation, while the CEOs in the other industries received $7.4 million. In other words, the 2012 compensation of copyright-intensive industry CEOs was more than triple the compensation of CEOs in the other industries. During the entire six-year period, copyright-intensive industry CEO compensation on average was 2.8 times higher than CEO compensation in the other industries. Moreover, between 2007 and 2012, CEO compensation in the copyright-intensive firms grew by 45%, while it increased by only 8% in the other industries.Additionally, CEO compensation as a percentage of revenue was more than twice as high in the copyright-intensive industries as in the other industries. CEO compensation as a percentage of revenue in the publishing industry was four times higher than in the transportation industry, almost three times higher than the non-copyright average, and twice as high as in the motion picture industry. In the copyright policy debates, the labor unions representing workers in copyright-intensive firms have joined with management in demanding greater intellectual property protection. Indeed, copyright policy is one of the few areas where the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce routinely agree with one another. They contend that copyright infringement is causing job loss in the United States. Nonetheless, during this period when the copyright-intensive industries purportedly are losing jobs because of attacks by pirates, CEO compensation has increased dramatically, both in absolute terms and relative to CEO compensation in other industries. These generous compensation packages belie the suggestion that the copyright industries confront an existential threat from infringement. Moreover, these upwardly trending compensation levels demonstrate that the copyright industry CEOs are not sharing the pain infringement allegedly causes their employees.

Workshop: E-Books and e-Lending in Libraries – Challenges and Opportunities

The proposed event is part of the 2013 program of IFLA (International Federation of Library Association) as well IFLA – CLM Committee on eBooks and e-lending. The proposed event is also part of the activities of a research project with international participation "Copyright Policies of libraries and other cultural institutions” (2012 -2014), (financed by National Science Fund of the Bulgarian Ministry of Education, Youth and Science, Contract No ДФНИ - К01/0002 -21.11.2012).

Policy implications of technology for detecting P2P and copyright violations

The effectiveness of many proposed policies regarding both online copyright protection and network neutrality depend on the extent to which it is technically possible to detect peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), the transfer of copyrighted files, or both. There are many detection approaches, some performed primarily by network operators and some by application-layer agents. This paper describes capabilities, limitations, privacy issues, and policy implications of detection technologies and their countermeasures, in part through quantitative analysis of empirical data. Different approaches are better for different purposes. Network operators are well-positioned to estimate how widespread copyright violations are, but application-layer detection from outside entities has important advantages when the purpose is punishment. Detection is also imperfect, so policies should require more transparency regarding how it is done than we see today. It is shown that, although network operators may not detect every transfer, and they typically miss more video than audio, they can identify most individuals who share copyrighted files via P2P after several weeks of monitoring provided that traffic is unencrypted, which is useful for some purposes. However, it is also shown that encryption is already in use, and it effectively prevents network operators from detecting transfers of copyrighted content. Thus, if network operators are held responsible for monitoring illegal file sharing, there is a tension between using detection to identify violators of copyright law for punishment, which may motivate even greater use of encryption, and using detection for other purposes such as creating fair compensation schemes for copyright-holders, warning users that they may be violating copyright law, or allocating network resources. Alternatively, there are forms of detection that are not evaded through encryption, and application-layer agents rather than network operators are primarily responsible for these. These copyright policy issues are intertwined with network neutrality policy in subtle ways. Network neutrality rules do not protect illegal transfers of copyrighted content, but if network operators are responsible for enforcement (as in “graduated response”) then regulators must determine when it is reasonable to terminate or degrade service based on allegations of copyright violation given the limitations of detection technology to prove those allegations. Allegations of copyright violation should be considered invalid unless they are accompanied with information about how detection was performed and an opportunity for rebuttal. Such transparency has been routinely lacking in both laws and industry agreements.

Comparison of Fair Dealing and Fair Use in Education Post-Pentalogy

While traditionally American fair use has been thought of as broader in scope than Canadian fair dealing, I claim that in 2013 this is no longer the case. I further argue that educational administrators and academic and library associations in Canada have yet to take full advantage of this expansion of users’ rights.In Part I I give a brief and general overview of copyright in Canada and the United States. In Part II I compare the legislation and jurisprudence specifically with respect to fair dealing and fair use, using the fairness factors as a guide. Specifically, this part will examine differences with respect to the fairness factors in general, transformativity, amount and substantiality, market harm and licences, and institutional practice and policy. Part III is a discussion of the advocacy efforts of Canadian and American educational and library professional associations and the development of best practices and guidelines. I conclude that colleges and universities in Canada may now confidently develop copyright policies that reflect the rights of users, but educational administrators and associations in Canada are lagging behind their American counterparts in leveraging this opportunity.This paper was presented as a work-in-progress at the IP Scholars Conference, Cardozo Law School, New York (9 August 2013).

How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing

Today, copyright policy is framed solely in terms of a trade off between the benefits of incentivizing authors to create new works and the losses from restricting access to those works. This is a mistake that has distorted the policy and legal debates concerning the fundamental role of copyright within scholarly publishing, as the incentive-to-create conventional wisdom asserts that copyright is unnecessary for researchers who are motivated for non-pecuniary reasons. As a result, commentators and legal decision-makers dismiss the substantial investments and productive labors of scholarly publishers as irrelevant to copyright policy. Furthermore, widespread misinformation about the allegedly “zero cost” of digital publication exacerbates this policy distortion. This paper fills a gap in the literature by providing the more complete policy, legal and economic context for evaluating scholarly publishing. It details for the first time the $100s of millions in ex ante investments in infrastructure, skilled labor, and other resources required to create, publish, distribute and maintain scholarly articles on the Internet and in other digital platforms. Based on interviews with representatives from scholarly publishers, it reveals publishers’ extensive and innovative development of digital distribution mechanisms since the advent of the World Wide Web in 1993. Even more important, this paper explains how these investments in private-ordering mechanisms reflect fundamental copyright policy, as copyright secures to both authors and publishers the fruits of their productive labors. In sum, copyright spurs both authors to invest in new works and publishers to invest in innovative, private-ordering mechanisms to distribute these works. Both of these fundamental copyright policies are as important today in our fast-changing digital world as they were in yesteryear’s world in which publishers distributed scholarly articles in dead-tree format.

Gone in 60 Seconds: The Impact of the Megaupload Shutdown on Movie Sales

The growth of Internet-based piracy has led to a wide-ranging debate over how copyright policy should be enforced in the digital era. In this paper we analyze the impact of the US government’s shutdown of a major piracy site — Megaupload.com — on digital sales and rentals of movies. Exploiting cross-country variation in pre-shutdown usage of Megaupload, we find that the shutdown of Megaupload and its associated sites caused digital revenues for three major motion picture studios to increase by 6.5-8.5%. Our results suggest that some consumers will turn to legal channels when a major filesharing site is shut down, and by extension that illegal filesharing displaces digital movie sales.

Journalistic right in the “first rough draft of history”: a comparative study of news copyright in the United States and the People's Republic of China

As more and more American media products enter the Chinese market, and vice versa, it is becoming increasingly important for legal scholars and journalists to understand how news products are regulated differently by the two countries' copyright policies. This article examines the issue of copyright protection for news in both China and the United States. The following research questions are discussed and answered in order to identify major conceptual and practical differences and similarities in the news copyright regimes of the two countries: How did the copyright law on news evolve? Is news copyrightable? Who owns news products? What rights do copyright owners have? How long is news work copyright protected? What are news work copyright restrictions? What if news copyright owners are foreign citizens? The article concludes by presenting and analyzing a hypothetical case involving both the Chinese and American copyright laws.

Copyright Law and Political Theology: Censorship and the Forebear’s Desire

This historical exploration, treating limit moments of copyright law, illuminates correspondences among copyright, censorship, pacts between the sovereign and commercial profit seekers, and inheritance law. Relevant to all of these are powerful forebears’ desires for recognition, modeled on the theological pattern of the father God’s omnipotent Will. Failure to recognize the wide persistence of this premodern theological pattern—which contrasts considerably with the common view that copyright’s main function is to incentivize the new—may result in faulty analysis of copyright law, including fair use.The study begins with Henry VIII’s 1538 Proclamation, which initiates a nationwide booklicensing regime. The Proclamation is put into context with other concerns of Henry at that time. Additional moments treated in this study include: Venetian printing privileges in the late fifteenth century; the London Stationers’ Company as an incorporated mechanism suitable to the crown’s ideology-control projects; efforts by Ponsonby, Greville, and Walsingham to block a competitor’s licensing of a Sidney Arcadia manuscript; the intellectual property clause of the U.S. Constitution; Wordsworth’s later-in-life attempts to make endure eternally, through copyright, the atemporal moment of creation that arose from his early poetry; and Sonny Bono’s (and our own) surprising resemblance to Wordsworth. The conclusion urges joint consideration of copyright and inheritance-law policies.

Digital Protest Skills and Online Activism Against Copyright Reform in France and the European Union

AbstractIn the past decade, parliaments in industrialized countries have been pressured to adopt more restrictive legislation to prevent unauthorized file‐sharing and enforce higher standards of digital copyright enforcement over entertainment media and computer software. A complex process of supranational and national lawmaking has resulted in several legislatures adopting such measures, with wide variations in content and implementation. These policy developments offer an interesting research puzzle, given their high political salience and the amount of controversy they have generated. Specifically, the introduction of harsher intellectual property regulations has resulted in intense “online” and “offline” collective action by skilled activists who have significantly altered the digital copyright policy field over the years. In France, grassroots movements have turned the passing of digital copyright infringement laws through Parliament into highly controversial episodes. Similarly, at the European level, the Telecoms Package Reform has given rise to an intense protest effort, carried by an ad hoc coalition of European activists. In both cases, online mobilization was an essential element of political contention against these legislative initiatives. In both cases, our analysis shows that online mobilization and contention can substantially affect policymaking by disrupting the course of parliamentary lawmaking at both the national and European levels. We provide an analytical framework to study these processes, as well as an analysis of the frames and digital network repertoires involved in the two cases under scrutiny, with reference to the nascent research agenda formed by the politics of intellectual property.

Author Rights vs Self-Archiving in Spanish Scientific Journals

The paper analyzes publishers’ copyright policies and self-archiving conditions of Spanish scientific journals. Data are extracted from the directory DULCINEA that contains information of 1318 Spanish journals, of which 775 (61%) allow some form of self-archiving to be about 60% of the post-print version and allowing them 87% of the deposit of the version of record. In 72% of journals the deposit can be performed immediately after publication and in 16% after article acceptance. 72% of the journals are freely available without charge to the user this figure raises up to 86% if free access after an embargo is considered. Only 18% of the journals use Creative Commons licenses. The adoption of different open access journals model in Spain is favorable, however there is still a high percentage of journals (39%) that do not provide any information about authors and publishers rights and that difficult or inhibits reuse of published articles.

What Drives IP without IP? A Study of the Online Adult Entertainment Industry

Existing copyright policy is based largely on the utilitarian theory of incentivizing creative works. This study looks at content production incentives in the online adult entertainment industry. A recent trend of industry-specific studies tries to better understand the relationship between intellectual property (IP) and creation incentives in practice. This study makes a contribution to the literature by analyzing a major entertainment content industry where copyright protection has been considerably weakened in recent years. Because copyright infringement is widespread and prohibitively difficult to prevent, producers have been effectively unable to rely on the economic benefits that copyright is intended to provide.Qualitative interviews with industry specialists and content producers support the hypothesis that copyright enforcement is not cost effective. As a result, many producers have developed alternative strategies to recoup their investment costs. Similar to the findings of other scholarly work on low-IP industries, this research finds a shift toward the production of experience goods. It also finds that some incentives to produce traditional content remain. The sustainability of providing convenience and experience goods while continuing content production relies partially on general, but also on industry-specific factors, such as consumer privacy preferences, consumption habits, low production costs, and high demand. While not all of these attributes translate to other industries, determining such factors and their limits brings us toward a better understanding of innovation mechanisms.

Copyright Policy and Practice in Electronic Reserves among ARL Libraries

This paper presents the results of a survey of 110 ARL institutions regarding their copyright policies for providing electronic reserves. It compiles descriptive statistics on library practice as well as coding responses to reveal trends and shared practices. Finally, it presents conclusions about policy making, decision making and risk aversion in ARL institutions.

Correction

November 2012, page 22—The third sentence below the subheading “Which strategy?” should read, “For example, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Physical Society (APS) both have journal copyright policies that allow authors to post the publisher’s PDF on their personal websites or in their institution’s repository.”© 2013 American Institute of Physics.

Multidisciplinary health professionals' assessments of risk: how are tools used to reach consensus about risk assessment and management?

Author accepted manuscript (Post-Print) made available in accordance with publisher copyright policy.

Author feedback in 2012

Author feedback in 2012

Five Reforms for Copyright

US copyright law deserves credit for encouraging an outpouring of original expressive works, bequeathing us a rich cultural heritage. But the copyright regime has grown too big and too powerful. We need to pursue a new direction in copyright reform: toward freedom. We can best improve copyright by limiting its power, repairing its foundations, and opening up ways to escape it entirely. Specifically, we should strive to (1) reinstate the Founders’ Copyright Act, (2) withdraw the US from the Berne Convention, (3) develop misuse doctrine into an escape from copyright, (4) focus copyright policy on consumers’ costs, not producers’ profits, and (5) reconceive “IP” as “Intellectual Privilege.” Property is neither an accurate label for copyright nor one we have to embrace by default. We can more accurately label copyright a privilege—a statutory exception to common-law rights and obligations that vests its holder with special powers and immunities. Copyright’s statutory privileges come only at hazard to our natural and common-law rights. To preserve our freedoms, therefore, we must reform copyright.