Optimal copyright length

[PeterBrett]

An interesting 2007 article for y'all to consider:

Researcher: Optimal copyright term is 14 years

(Apologies if this has been posted before).

[jez9999]

Rick Falkvinge believes that the length should be 5 years with no extension, in the 21st century, and that even that can be considered a bit too high. I'm inclined to agree with him.

[EdmundRW]

I think there's a great benefit in listening to Cambridge University Economics Phd candidates. 14 years was the original copyright term so it's a very defensible position.
We've had a vote now though so we should probably rest the matter for now

[Duke]

From what I recall the Gowers Report had some findings based on work done by Cambridge academics. This may be related to that (although it's dated a few months later). I'm not particularly impressed with ars technica, though - if you read the actual paper, it says that the optimal length is approximately fifteen years, not 14... it seems neither the reviewers or any of the commenters noticed.

Anyways; personally I think it will be rather hard to sell 5 years - 15 sounds like something of a compromise (although I think I voted for 10 in the poll). For the record, it looks like someone at the European Commission is trying to push for a 20-year extension to the copyright on recordings (currently at 50 years). The original plan was for a 45-year extension to bring it in line with the US - apparently 20-years was a compromise.

[jez9999]

Hard to sell to the current establishment? Who gives a damn? We're trying to reform copyright law here, not make a deal with them. They're on another planet when it comes to copyright duration, frankly, and we should be looking at this from an objective position and simply sticking to our demands of a sensible copyright length. I want no compromises, no 'bargains', with the establishment. Screw that.

[JohnB]

5 to 10 is a nice short length, and one I'm happy to defend.

I can make an argument for abolition (zero) however that was rejected in the member vote, and on at least pragmatic grounds, and possibly principled ones, I agree. I also agree with Jez, given that we accept a limited copyright protection for commercial use, then it really should be limited! and even 5 or 10 years is quite a long time. Really it's a very long time!

The academic research is interesting, and of course if offered the chance I would be delighted to accept 14+14 (max 28 year copyright) compared to what we have now. At the same time, I believe we should not be afraid to say what we really want, and while I'm not yet convinced about abolition, I do really favour "no longer than necessary", and for preference determined by evidence-based policy.

[buxton]

I'd say "sorry for the Thread Necromancy", but I'm not.

The draft/sketch/"something" 5+5 policy (with the +5 for some reason being forbidden to closed-source software, yet not forbidden to musical works which don't include the master tracks / sheet music / midi patches, nor movies which don't come with a copy of the script and set-designs) strikes me as genuinely absurd.

I work for a very small company. My employer has sunk a whole crapload of money (programmer wages * multiple years of development = much money) into developing a "vertical market" application (i.e. something which is of high value to a specific business market and pretty much worthless to "the world in general"). Giving them only five years to try to recoup that initial outlay, let alone *gasp* turn a profit, would've caused them to never bother in the first place - causing at least 6 full-time jobs to never have been created.

I honestly believe it would be more effective to encourage open source software through the government leading by example, and preferring (possibly even mandating) FLOSS for certain government purchases - for instance I'd love to see schools broadly adopt OpenOffice and the like, even if they opted to stay on Windows for the time being. A strong show of top-down support for OSI licenses (and Creative Commons licenses for non-software content) would also be very valuable - maybe even allowing legal aid (or something similar) for Open Content (i.e. FLOSS/CC) creators who have had their Open content abused by a big company? (the "set-top-box/router problem")

Denying extensions to closed-source software fundamentally devalues the commercial worth of professional programmers. (Also, given that the relevant old poll concluded that neither compulsory source escrow nor extension-for-OSS were approved by the then-members who voted, why is the idea still kicking around anyway?)

Now I've spent a whole load of electrons saying what I don't like, here's what I would like to see: 10+10 for everything, even closed-source software (perhaps grant the extension to FLOSS/CC material automatically without the need to re-register, as a modest positive incentive?). I wouldn't strenuously object to somewhat longer terms, but I think that's a reasonable balance - giving the Long Tail effect a decent chance, while not locking cultural heritage up in Mickey-Mousian perpetuity.

I appreciate there were polls on these issues back in august, but I wasn't around then and those threads are now locked. If there's a more-appropriate place for me to voice these concerns, it's not immediately apparent.

[PeterBrett]

I work for a very small company. My employer has sunk a whole crapload of money (programmer wages * multiple years of development = much money) into developing a "vertical market" application (i.e. something which is of high value to a specific business market and pretty much worthless to "the world in general"). Giving them only five years to try to recoup that initial outlay, let alone *gasp* turn a profit, would've caused them to never bother in the first place - causing at least 6 full-time jobs to never have been created.

Actually, it provides an incentive for your company to continue to innovate. From five years after initially going to market, your users would have a choice:

• Use a 5-year-old version of your software, for free, but with no vendor support, no patches available, etc.
• Pay your (presumably reasonable) price for the up-to-date software, for which they would receive support and bug fix patches.

The greater the rate at which you improve your software and/or client support, the higher a price the market will sustain.

You could even make the 5-year-old version available as a free download from your website as part of promoting your latest release. After all, if people are already using your application, they'd be more receptive to paying if and when they run into problems which require fixes/features/support.

I appreciate there were polls on these issues back in august, but I wasn't around then and those threads are now locked. If there's a more-appropriate place for me to voice these concerns, it's not immediately apparent.

This thread was mostly aimed at discussing the article I linked, which considered the problem from a rather abstracted viewpoint, using things like mathematics and statistical economics. Your comments might be better addressed to the poll results thread, or possibly to a new one in this section.

[buxton]

This thread was mostly aimed at discussing the article I linked, which considered the problem from a rather abstracted viewpoint, using things like mathematics and statistical economics. Your comments might be better addressed to the poll results thread, or possibly to a new one in this section.

Eeks, yeah, good point well made - I've spawned it off into a new thread. (bad programming pun very much intended)

[martinbudden]

The underlying paper Forever minus a day? Some theory and empirics of optimal copyright by Rufus Pollock (http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyright.pdf) is interesting. He works out a mathematical model for optimal copyright and shows how the optimal copyright length can be derived from three factors:

s: elasticity of supply with respect to revenue
gamma: the rate of diminishing returns
alpha: the ratio of deadweight losses to welfare under copyright

He then goes to say about these factors:

s: There is an almost total lack of data which would allow us to estimate the elasticity of supply with respect to revenue.

gamma: Ghose, Smith, and Telang (2004) list a whole range of estimates for γ − 1 (all derived from Amazon) ranging from -0.834 to -0.952 with the best estimate being -0.871.

alpha: Estimating alpha is harder because of the paucity of data which would permit estimation of off-equilibrium points on the demand curve.

Talking about the overall uncertainty he says:

Given the uncertainty over the values of some of the variables it is important to derive optimal copyright term under a variety of scenarios to check the robustness of these results. Table 1 presents optimal term under a range of possible parameter values including those at the extreme of the ranges suggested above.

Code: Select all

Cultural Decay Rate(%) Discount Rate(%) alpha Optimal Term
                   2.0                4  0.05        51.97
                   3.5                5  0.07        30.63
                   5.0                6  0.10        18.06
                   6.5                7  0.15         9.25
                   8.0                8  0.20         4.53
Table 1. Optimal Term Under Various Scenarios.


With variables at the very lower end of the spectrum (the first row) optimal term comes out at 52 years which is substantially shorter than authorial copyright term in almost all jurisdictions and roughly equal to the 50 years frequently afforded to neighbouring rights (such as those in recordings).
...
As this shows, the mode of the distribution is around 20 years and the median is just under 15 years. From the underlying cumulative distribution function we can calculate percentiles and find the 95th percentile at just under 31 years, the 99th percentile at 39 years and the 99.9th percentile at just over 47 years. This would suggest, that at least under the parameters ranges used here, one can be extremely confident that copyright term should be 50 years or less – and it is highly like that term is under 30 years (95th percentile).

He concludes "current copyrights are likely too long – using several robustness checks" and "Regarding the derivation of optimal term, the main challenge would be to improve the estimates for the key parameters, especially that of the ratio of deadweight loss to welfare under copyright."


From this paper we can say:

1) Current copyright lengths are almost certainly too long
2) According to the model we can be extremely confident the the optimal copyright length is less than 50 years, it is highly likely that the optimal copyright length is less than 39 years, and it is probable that the optimal copyright length is less than 30 years.
3) An initial estimate of optimal copyright length is 15 years, but that estimate has a considerable error range, it's more like an estimate of 5 to 40 years.
4) Further work is required to improve the estimates of the key parameters to reduce the error range of the optimal copyright term.

[PeterBrett]

1) Current copyright lengths are almost certainly too long
2) According to the model we can be extremely confident the the optimal copyright length is less than 50 years, it is highly likely that the optimal copyright length is less than 39 years, and it is probable that the optimal copyright length is less than 30 years.
3) An initial estimate of optimal copyright length is 15 years, but that estimate has a considerable error range, it's more like an estimate of 5 to 40 years.
4) Further work is required to improve the estimates of the key parameters to reduce the error range of the optimal copyright term.

The further work is definitely something that PPUK should be trying to carry out, I think!