Intellectual property law has intended benefits, but it also carries certain costs — deliberately so. Skeptics have asked: Why should intellectual property law exist at all? To get traction on that overly broad but still important inquiry, we decided to ask a new, preliminary question: What do...

This article is based on an original survey of over 5,000 musicians nationwide. The survey results demonstrate the diversity of the population of musicians, in terms of genre, income bracket, demographics, education, and many other variables. In this article I focus on how the mix of revenue...

Copyright offers protection to creative works, but new technologies put pressure on that protection. Copyright owners and technology firms negotiate over new ways of distributing and transmitting creative works. Understanding the shadow that copyright casts on private negotiations will allow...

Control over property is valuable in and of itself. Scholars have not fully recognized or explored that straightforward premise, which has profound implications for the economic analysis of property rights. A party to a property dispute may actually prefer liability-rule protection for an...

For over a century and with increasing frequency, major controversies have erupted between large distributors of copyrighted works (song publishers, movie studios, record labels, book publishers, etc.) and makers of new technologies for experiencing those works (player piano manufacturers, VCR...

Copyright law treats webcasters like Pandora, on-demand streaming services like Spotify, the satellite radio company Sirius XM, and traditional radio broadcasters like Clear Channel in vastly different ways. The total royalties paid by each type of music distribution service to copyright owners...

In 1996, Congress increased the limits on how many radio stations one firm can own within a single “radio market.” To enforce these limits, the FCC used an idiosyncratic method of defining radio markets, based on the complex geometry of the signal contour patterns of radio stations’...