Written Description: More on Valuing the Public Domain

"Michael Risch previously posted on the study by Paul Heald, Kris Erickson, and Martin Kretschmer on the value of public domain photographs on Wikipedia. Those authors, along with Fabian Homberg and Dinusha Mendis, have posted a new paper, Copyright and the Value of the Public Domain: An Empirical Assessment, an independent report commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office. Their 90-page report has the ambitious goals of defining the public domain, mapping its size and frequency of use, identifying business models that benefit from the public domain, and evaluating existing theories of creativity based on these results. This report builds on work by scholars such as Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig, and James Boyle, who have sought to define 'the public domain' not just as the absence of copyright, but as an independent and valuable thing that is worth defending.  In this new UK IPO report, Erickson et al. define the public domain as including (1) works for which copyright has expired, (2) works that were never protected by copyright (from antiquity and folklore), (3) underlying ideas not being substantial expression, and (4) works offered to the public domain by their creator under a free and open license (including for commercial use). (While I think their definition makes sense, it might be worth trying to disentangle value from works with expired copyrights, which conceivably might not exist without copyright, and other works.) They do not attempt to quantify the overall value of the public domain (a perhaps impossible task). Rather, they describe results from three empirical studies as an initial step toward a larger assessment. In addition to the Wikipedia photo study that Michael described, they present results from interviews with 22 UK firms that used public domain materials and from a study of public-domain materials on Kickstarter ..."