A New Approach to Analyzing Convergence and Synchronicity in Growth and Business Cycles: Cross Recurrence Plots and Quantification Analysis

Convergence and synchronisation of business and growth cycles are important issues in the efficient formulation of euro area economic policies, and in particular European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy. Although several studies in the economics literature address the issue of synchronicity of growth within the euro area, this is the first study to address this issue using cross-recurrence analysis. The main findings are that member state growth rates had largely converged before the introduction of the euro, but there is a wide degree of different synchronisation behaviours which appear non-linear in nature. Many of the euro area member states display what is termed here as "intermittency" in synchronization, although this is not consistent across countries or members of the euro area. These differences in synchronization behaviors could cause problems in future implementation of euro area monetary policy.Euro area; business cycles; growth cycles; recurrence plots; recurrence quantification analysis; non-stationarity; complex systems; surrogate analysis.

Reconciling Intellectual and Personal Property

This Article examines both the forces undermining copy ownership and the important functions it serves within the copyright system in order to construct a workable notion of consumer property rights in digital media. Part I begins by examining the relationship between intellectual and personal property. Sometimes courts have treated those rights as inseparable, as if transfer of a copy entails transfer of the intangible right, or retention of the copyright entails ongoing control over particular copies. But Congress and most courts have recognized personal and intellectual property as interests that can be transferred separately. Although the better view, this approach frequently overstates the independence of copyrights and rights in copies. Those interests interact; each helps to define the boundary of the other. The exhaustion principle, though historically associated with a clear distinction between copy and copyright, is in fact the primary tool in copyright law for mediating the somewhat indistinct line separating the copy and the work. Part II begins to outline the breakdown of this once stable equilibrium, focusing on the erosion of the notion of consumer ownership. In recent decades, courts have created two distinct regimes for resolving questions of copy ownership: one that applies to software and one that applies to everything else. The software regime endorses rightsholders’ efforts to “license” particular copies of their works, in contrast to the general skepticism with which courts regard such efforts. This dichotomy is driven in part by software exceptionalism—the notion that for a variety of reasons software should be treated differently. But the growing acceptance of the licensing model also reflects changing views of property. Those shifts opened the door to the substitution of statutory property rights with unilateral contract terms. As the line separating software from other media becomes increasingly blurred, the thinking reflected in the software cases suggests a creeping erosion of copy ownership. But as Part III details, the erosion of ownership is only half of the problem. The copy, once the uncontroversial locus of consumer property rights, has transformed as well. Copies were once persistent, valuable, readily identifiable, and easily accounted. But the days of the unitary copy are numbered. Today, copies are discarnate, ephemeral, ubiquitous, and of little value in themselves. In part these changes reflect shifting consumer demand. But more importantly, they signal the increasing disconnect between copyright law’s conception of the copy and today’s technological reality. We are witnessing a blurring of the formerly clear distinction between the intangible work and the tangible copy, a distinction that has been central to copyright law’s approach to balancing intellectual and personal property rights. In light of the challenge of squaring the existing doctrinal framework for exhaustion with these developments, we turn in Part IV to an examination of the functions served by copy ownership. With a better understanding of the role of copy ownership within the copyright system, we will be better positioned to craft an approach to consumer property rights in the post-copy era. We identify three primary functions of copy ownership. First, locating consumer rights in a particular copy helps preserve the rivalry that distinguishes real property from intellectual property, thus preventing consumer rights from unduly interfering with the ability of the copyright holder’s to exploit the work. Second, copy ownership encourages consumers to participate in copyright markets rather than rely on unauthorized sources of content. Third, a stable and reliable notion of copy ownership reduces information cost externalities by eliminating idiosyncratic transfers of rights in copies. Part V argues that while these three functions historically have been bound up in the single, unitary copy that defined distribution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the copy is not essential to achieving those goals. Instead, the copy served as a token, signaling that each of the three functional concerns at the heart of exhaustion was satisfied. With this new understanding of the place of the copy, we outline the structure of a new exhaustion doctrine that more carefully and transparently interrogates exhaustion’s underlying policy concerns, rather than using the unitary copy as a proxy for consumer rights

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy

An argument for retaining the notion of personal property in the products we “buy” in the digital marketplace. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don\u27t own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell\u27s 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn\u27t. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property. Of course, ebooks, cloud storage, streaming, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.https://repository.law.umich.edu/books/1114/thumbnail.jp

Copyright Exhaustion and the Personal Use Dilemma

Copyright law struggles to provide a coherent framework for analyzing personal uses. Although there is widespread agreement that at least some such uses are non-infringing, the doctrinal basis for that conclusion remains unclear. In particular, the prevailing explanations of fair use and implied license are both flawed in important respects. This Article proposes a new explanation for the favored status of certain personal uses. Drawing on the principle of copyright exhaustion - the notion that once the copyright holder parts with a particular copy of a work, its power to control the use and disposition of that copy is constrained - we argue that many personal uses are rendered lawful by virtue of the simple fact of copy ownership. Owning copies entitles consumers to make certain uses of those copies and the works embodied in them, even in ways that may appear inconsistent with the rights of copyright holders. Under exhaustion, any copy owner has the right to reproduce, modify, and distribute her copy in order to fully realize its value qua copy. In a variety of personal use cases, courts have been swayed by arguments that highlight the defendant’s purchase or rightful ownership of a copy. But the prevailing approaches to personal use take copy ownership into account inconsistently and awkwardly, forcing courts to shoehorn their intuitions about ownership into doctrines designed to address very different questions. In contrast, exhaustion places copy ownership at the center of the digital personal use debate. And it helps us reconcile our intuitions about the proper scope of consumer control over copies they own with our formal legal articulations of the scope of infringement liability

The End of Ownership

An argument for retaining the notion of personal property in the products we “buy” in the digital marketplace. If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don't own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn't. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property. Of course, ebooks, cloud storage, streaming, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us

Reconciling Intellectual and Personal Property

This Article examines both the forces undermining copy ownership and the important functions it serves within the copyright system in order to construct a workable notion of consumer property rights in digital media. Part I begins by examining the relationship between intellectual and personal property. Sometimes courts have treated those rights as inseparable, as if transfer of a copy entails transfer of the intangible right, or retention of the copyright entails ongoing control over particular copies. But Congress and most courts have recognized personal and intellectual property as interests that can be transferred separately. Although the better view, this approach frequently overstates the independence of copyrights and rights in copies. Those interests interact; each helps to define the boundary of the other. The exhaustion principle, though historically associated with a clear distinction between copy and copyright, is in fact the primary tool in copyright law for mediating the somewhat indistinct line separating the copy and the work. Part II begins to outline the breakdown of this once stable equilibrium, focusing on the erosion of the notion of consumer ownership. In recent decades, courts have created two distinct regimes for resolving questions of copy ownership: one that applies to software and one that applies to everything else. The software regime endorses rightsholders’ efforts to “license” particular copies of their works, in contrast to the general skepticism with which courts regard such efforts. This dichotomy is driven in part by software exceptionalism—the notion that for a variety of reasons software should be treated differently. But the growing acceptance of the licensing model also reflects changing views of property. Those shifts opened the door to the substitution of statutory property rights with unilateral contract terms. As the line separating software from other media becomes increasingly blurred, the thinking reflected in the software cases suggests a creeping erosion of copy ownership. But as Part III details, the erosion of ownership is only half of the problem. The copy, once the uncontroversial locus of consumer property rights, has transformed as well. Copies were once persistent, valuable, readily identifiable, and easily accounted. But the days of the unitary copy are numbered. Today, copies are discarnate, ephemeral, ubiquitous, and of little value in themselves. In part these changes reflect shifting consumer demand. But more importantly, they signal the increasing disconnect between copyright law’s conception of the copy and today’s technological reality. We are witnessing a blurring of the formerly clear distinction between the intangible work and the tangible copy, a distinction that has been central to copyright law’s approach to balancing intellectual and personal property rights. In light of the challenge of squaring the existing doctrinal framework for exhaustion with these developments, we turn in Part IV to an examination of the functions served by copy ownership. With a better understanding of the role of copy ownership within the copyright system, we will be better positioned to craft an approach to consumer property rights in the post-copy era. We identify three primary functions of copy ownership. First, locating consumer rights in a particular copy helps preserve the rivalry that distinguishes real property from intellectual property, thus preventing consumer rights from unduly interfering with the ability of the copyright holder’s to exploit the work. Second, copy ownership encourages consumers to participate in copyright markets rather than rely on unauthorized sources of content. Third, a stable and reliable notion of copy ownership reduces information cost externalities by eliminating idiosyncratic transfers of rights in copies. Part V argues that while these three functions historically have been bound up in the single, unitary copy that defined distribution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the copy is not essential to achieving those goals. Instead, the copy served as a token, signaling that each of the three functional concerns at the heart of exhaustion was satisfied. With this new understanding of the place of the copy, we outline the structure of a new exhaustion doctrine that more carefully and transparently interrogates exhaustion’s underlying policy concerns, rather than using the unitary copy as a proxy for consumer rights

Is Economic Growth Synchronicity Higher in Europe than Elsewhere?

Synchronization of growth rates are an important feature of international business cycles, particularly in relation to regional integration projects such as the single currency in Europe. Synchronization of growth rates clearly enhances the effectiveness of European Central Bank monetary policy, ensuring that policy changes are more attuned to the dynamics of growth and business cycles in the majority of euro area member states. In this paper a dissimilarity metric is constructed by measuring the topological differences between the GDP growth patterns in recurrence plots for individual countries. The results show that synchronization of growth rates were higher among the euro area member states during the second half of the 1980s and from 1997 to roughly 2002. Apart from these two time periods, euro area member states do not appear to be more synchronized than a group of major international countries, suggesting that apart from specific times when European integration initiatives were being implemented, globalization was the dominant factor behind international business cycle synchronization

Copyright Exhaustion and the Personal Use Dilemma

Copyright law struggles to provide a coherent framework for analyzing personal uses. Although there is widespread agreement that at least some such uses are non-infringing, the doctrinal basis for that conclusion remains unclear. In particular, the prevailing explanations of fair use and implied license are both flawed in important respects. This Article proposes a new explanation for the favored status of certain personal uses. Drawing on the principle of copyright exhaustion - the notion that once the copyright holder parts with a particular copy of a work, its power to control the use and disposition of that copy is constrained - we argue that many personal uses are rendered lawful by virtue of the simple fact of copy ownership. Owning copies entitles consumers to make certain uses of those copies and the works embodied in them, even in ways that may appear inconsistent with the rights of copyright holders. Under exhaustion, any copy owner has the right to reproduce, modify, and distribute her copy in order to fully realize its value qua copy. In a variety of personal use cases, courts have been swayed by arguments that highlight the defendant’s purchase or rightful ownership of a copy. But the prevailing approaches to personal use take copy ownership into account inconsistently and awkwardly, forcing courts to shoehorn their intuitions about ownership into doctrines designed to address very different questions. In contrast, exhaustion places copy ownership at the center of the digital personal use debate. And it helps us reconcile our intuitions about the proper scope of consumer control over copies they own with our formal legal articulations of the scope of infringement liability