The distributional impact of KiwiSaver incentives

New Zealand’s approach to retirement incomes profoundly changed with the recent introduction of KiwiSaver and its associated tax incentives. Previous policy reduced lifetime inequality but KiwiSaver and its tax incentives will increase future inequality and lead to diverging living standards for the elderly. In this paper we evaluate the distributional effects of these tax incentives. Using data from a nationwide survey conducted by the authors, we estimate the value of the equivalent income transfer provided to individuals by the tax incentives for KiwiSaver participation. Concentration curves and inequality decompositions are used to compare the distributive impact of these tax incentives with those for New Zealand Superannuation. Estimates are reported for both initial and lifetime impacts, with the greatest effect on inequality apparent in the lifetime impacts

City and Countryside Revisited. Comparative rent movements in London and the South-East, 1580-1914

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has suggested that 'the city drove the countryside, not the reverse'. This paper assembles new serial data on urban and agricultural rent movements in Kent, Essex and London, from 1580-1914, which enables us to provide a tentative estimate of the strength of the urban variable and the productivity of land across the rural-urban continuum. Our initial findings support the revisionist view, and throw new light on London's position within the wider metropolitan region. Comparative rent movements suggests a greater continuity between town and countryside than has often been assumed, with sharp increases in rental values occurring on the rural-urban fringes of London and the lower Medway valley

The Rebirth of Copyright As an Opt-In System?

For most of the history of Anglo-American copyright law, copyright was an opt-in system: Authors had to jump through certain regulatory hoops if they wanted to prevent others from copying their works without consent. These threshold formalities included registering their works with a government agency, affixing a notice to published copies, depositing exemplars with a centralized library, and more. A failure to comply with the requirements usually meant a diminution in the authors’ copyright entitlement – and in some cases a wholesale forfeiture, under which the works would pass immediately into the public domain. After some 200 years, however, U.S. copyright abandoned its formal requirements. Beginning in 1976 and culminating in 1989, Congress responded to complaints from authors (who had sometimes lost protection due to what they viewed as a technicality) and to pressure to join the international copyright community (which forbade most formalities). Copyright law accordingly underwent a conversion from opt-in to opt-out. [...

Google Books: Finally, an Actual Fair Use Ruling!

One of our favorite topics in this Intellectual Property Issues series – perhaps the favorite – is Google Books, the massive project through which Google hopes to bring its search capability to the text of all books in the English language. To make a book’s text searchable, however, Google must scan the book. And scanning is copying. And copying usually means copyright infringement. Certainly the many authors and publishers who have sued Google take this view. There are two ways to avoid infringement when copying a copyrighted book: get a license or prove that the copying constitutes fair use. Many publishers have in fact granted Google Books the necessary licenses, and for many others the licensing option was in play in a proposed settlement of the Google Books lawsuits. But objections to the far-reaching terms of that settlement (including, as noted by Randy Picker, objections based on antitrust and class action law) led the judge to scuttle the deal. Peter Menell proposed that the controversy might be best resolved legislatively by Congress or a public commission (and he has more recently called for a fee shifting approach to fair use claims), but so far his calls have not been heeded – and in any event Randy Picker cast doubt on the direction that some of the contemplated legislation was headed. [...

Google\u27s (Fair) Use of Copyrighted Work

Letters to the Editor on Google\u27s (Fair) Use of Copyrighted Wor

Accidental Rights

Written for the Yale Law Journal\u27s online Pocket Part, this is a much shorter and (I hope) more accessible iteration of my earlier paper, Risk Aversion and Rights Accretion in Intellectual Property Law, 116 Yale L.J. 882 (2007). It summarizes that paper\u27s central point - i.e., that intellectual property entitlements are growing not just because of expansive court decisions and legislative enactments, but also because of seemingly sensible, risk-averse licensing decisions that inadvertently feed back into legal doctrine - and then explores how this phenomenon might apply to (and be manipulated by) enterprises such as Google Book Search

Four Ways in Which Kirtsaeng Might Be Undone

In my previous entry in this series, I discussed the Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, involving the unauthorized resale in the United States of textbooks purchased overseas. Indeed, the Kirtsaeng case and the issue it presented have been a popular subject of IP Issues commentary; before the Supreme Court ruling, I wrote on the issue here and here, and Randy Picker had some commentary both beforeand after the opinion came down. You can read those earlier entries for the details, but the outcome of the case is clear: U.S. copyright law does not prohibit the buyer of any lawfully made good from reselling it, even if the good was made abroad, and even if the owner of the copyright in the good objects to the resale. In this essay, I will look at the various ways in which the Kirtsaeng decision might be undone. Copyright owners don’t like the decision, but how can they get around it? How might they reassert control over the downstream distribution of their goods? There are four possibilities. [...

Copyright as Censorship - Part I

2010 marks the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, the English legislation that ushered in the modern era of copyright law. The Statute of Anne is celebrated for a number of reasons, and perhaps foremost among them is its rejection of copyright as an instrument of censorship. Before Parliament enacted the Statute, the distribution of books was controlled by the government through royal charters, which granted monopolies over printing and empowered the chartered firms to seize unauthorized books and bring their publishers before the courts. The Statute of Anne put an end to this practice and replaced it with a system of exclusive rights for individual authors, with the goal being “the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books.” Despite this shift, the use of copyright law as an instrument of censorship did not die out in 1710. Instead, censorship continued in at least two ways: (1) direct censorship arising from courts’ judgments about the immorality of certain publications; and (2) indirect censorship through courts’ embrace of lawsuits in which the copyright owner was motivated by a desire to suppress expression rather than disseminate it. Here I examine the first form of censorship, leaving the second for a future essay. [...