Going means trouble and staying makes it double: the value of licensing recorded music online

This paper discusses whether a copyright compensation system (CCS) for recorded music—endowing private Internet subscribers with the right to download and use works in return for a fee—would be welfare increasing. It reports on the results of a discrete choice experiment conducted with a representative sample of the Dutch population consisting of 4986 participants. Under some conservative assumptions, we find that applied only to recorded music, a mandatory CCS could increase the welfare of rights holders and users in the Netherlands by over €600 million per year (over €35 per capita). This far exceeds current rights holder revenues from the market of recorded music of ca. €144 million per year. A monthly CCS fee of ca. €1.74 as a surcharge on Dutch Internet subscriptions would raise the same amount of revenues to rights holders as the current market for recorded music. With a voluntary CCS, the estimated welfare gains to users and rights holders are even greater for CCS fees below €20 on the user side. A voluntary CCS would also perform better in the long run, as it could retain a greater extent of market coordination. The results of our choice experiment indicate that a well-designed CCS for recorded music would simultaneously make users and rights holders better off. This result holds even if we correct for frequently observed rates of overestimation in contingent valuation studies

Introduction

The World Intellectual Property Organization General Assembly adopted the Development Agenda in September 2007, after three years of acrimonious debate. The Agenda radically transforms WIPO's mandate and reverberates throughout the international intellectual property regime, including in ongoing battles within the World Trade Organization over the future direction of "TRIPS", the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property. Yet despite its powerful symbolic message, the full extent of the Development Agenda's actual impact on the ground, both within WIPO and without, remains to be seen. This chapter places the WIPO Development Agenda in the context of evolving development policy generally, discusses the Agenda's principal provisions, and summarizes the multifarious contributions to the book

X wie Krux

Book synopsis: European institutions affect the day-to-day functioning of film, television, radio and the Internet. Their 'meddling' with media provokes many tensions, most importantly with Member States including France, Germany, Belgium and Hungary. In addition, Europe's intervention is often deemed overly economic in approach, focusing on the success of an internal market - to the detriment of public interest objectives such as pluralism, diversity and universality. This handbook sheds light on these tensions through state-of-the-art, scientific contributions on the various domains of European media policies. Their collective aim is to explore key concepts and theoretical approaches to European media policy: its historical development; specific policies for film, television, radio and the Internet; competition law and its effect on the media sector; and international aspects of the fragmented policy domain

The time limit on copyright: an unlikely tragedy of the intellectual commons

With their “tragedy of the commons” paradigm for intellectual property, Landes and Posner argue that the most important benefit of intellectual property rights is not that they generate incentives to create new works, but that they ensure the efficient exploitation of existing intellectual works. This alternative economic case for IP notably relies on the argument that allowing the copyright on certain massively popular works to expire could lead to their overexploitation, generating negative externalities similar to congestion externalities. This article will assess in detail the plausibility of this effect, by reviewing its most plausible interpretations: a boredom effect, a “blurring” or “tarnishment” effect, a snob effect, or a decrease in product diversity. I will argue that while Landes and Posner’s argument is ultimately inconclusive and unverified by the current state of empirical research, it also raises greater challenges than has usually been thought. Moreover, taking their argument seriously can also contribute to a better understanding of the purposes and limits of an intellectual property regime