We use a novel database on U. S. federal court decisions to measure the changes in the state of copyright protection in both statute and case law. We combine an index of copyright breadth derived from this database with a quarterly panel of firms in creative industries over the years 1986-1998....

Markets for information and entertainment are frequently characterized by increasing returns to scale in production and distribution. This implies that incumbent technologies enjoy an advantage over newcomer technologies; such markets can become locked into an inferior technology. Governments...