The copyright industries savour their role as critical intermediaries in the copyright supply chain. To this end they are continually seeking to strengthen their legal entitlements by arguing that stronger copyright incentives fuel future creative action. But the reality of creativity is...

The Internet has ruffled the feathers of copyright law. In response policy makers and rightsholders have sought to expand the legislative boundaries of copyright and embed technical and contractual constraints into works themselves. These measures - collectively termed Digital Rights Management...

This paper examines the welfare effects of intellectual property protection, accounting for firms' optimal responses to legal environments and technological innovation. I examine firms' use of indirect price discrimination in response to U.S. copyright law, which effectively prevents direct...

Copyright is accepted as being the necessary and efficient response to the need of authors and publishers to appropriate the economic value of copyright works from users. Nevertheless, difficulties arise when such works are both produced and consumed within universities. The law recognizes that...

The article describes a future copyright system for the Internet according to which the copyright owner is free to choose between exclusive exploitation on the basis of digital rights management and a business model where users may lawfully share the work for non-commercial purposes in...

This paper evaluates the nature, relative incidence and drivers of software piracy. In contrast to prior studies, we analyze data that allows us to measure piracy for a specific product - Windows 7 - which was associated with a significant level of private sector investment. Using anonymized...

This chapter in an upcoming book on the law and economics of copyright provides a basic primer on the economics of the public domain, discussing extant models and references, including new graphs comparing used book and new book markets to represent market distortions enabled by copyright protection

Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of authorship is typically not available to the public. Moreover at...

Copyright enforcement is riddled with false positives. A false positive occurs when enforcement actions are taken against uses that are not actual infringements. Far from benign occurrences, copyright false positives inflict significant social harm in the form of increased litigation and...