Public Performance Rights Research Articles

Copyright Law and Price Discrimination

I show that copyright law is intimately connected to price discrimination. First, price discrimination is common in markets for copyrighted works. Second, many features of copyright law affect resale or personal arbitrage and so influence the profitability of price discrimination. For example, the first sale doctrine and the fair use doctrine often facilitate arbitrage and discourage discrimination, while the derivative and public performance rights impede arbitrage and promote discrimination. Third, optimal copyright policy requires attention to the social costs and benefits from price discrimination. I use models of price discrimination to unify the analysis of a wide range of copyright policy issues. I argue that public performance rights are desirable because they support fine-grained price discrimination and displace other forms of price discrimination that have greater social cost. I argue against a broad definition of the derivative right that includes movie merchandise. Movie merchandising usually imposes allocative and implementation costs with little offsetting benefit in terms of creative incentive. I show that personal copying and other activities possibly covered by fair use have mixed effects on price discrimination and social welfare. Finally, I argue that the importation right should not cover gray market goods and should not be used to facilitate geographic price discrimination.

The War Symphonies: Shostakovich against Stalin. Dir. Larry Weinstein. Oley, Penn.: Bullfrog Films, 1997. Produced by Rhombus Media. Music by Dmitrii Shostakovich. 82 minutes. $275.00, including public performance rights.

The War Symphonies: Shostakovich against Stalin. Dir. Larry Weinstein. Oley, Penn.: Bullfrog Films, 1997. Produced by Rhombus Media. Music by Dmitrii Shostakovich. 82 minutes. $275.00, including public performance rights.

Copyright and Related Rights: The International Dimension

Copyright is the body of law on which the distribution of cultural products depends. The environment for international marketing depends on the joint effect of a mosaic of national copyright laws. An important aspect of recent international initiatives has been the detailed integration of copyright and trade into the NAFTA and the GATT. We discuss these agreements and conclude with an analysis of three issues of current importance in international copyright—moral rights, direct broadcast satellites, and public performance rights for performers and record producers.

Performing-Right Societies in the United States

On 13 February 1979, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) marked its sixty-fifth year in operation as a performing-right licensing agency. Its rival, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), has been in existence for almost forty of those years. The two organizations hold primary responsibility for collecting and distributing the fees resulting from one of the most valuable rights granted by the copyright laws to the creator of a musical work: the exclusive right of public performance of copyrighted musical compositions. The idea that composers are entitled to authorize performances of their work and to share in any profits resulting from the use of their work, beyond the initial sale of a physical copy of the work, achieved late recognition in American copyright law. In 1856, Congress amended the Copyright Act of 1831 to grant exclusive performance rights in dramatic works and thereby to guard against unauthorized public performances, but did not extend the same protection to nondramatic musical works until 1897. The new amendment provided that: