Friday’s Endnotes – 10/23/15

Can economic and historical analyses end copyright law’s property/monopoly disputes? — Tom Sydnor: “We can now resolve 300-year-old debates about whether copyrights are monopoly rights or property rights. Modern law and economics provide no basis for distinguishing copyrights from other private property rights that also tend to promote imperfect competition by innovation among producers of differentiated goods, services, and works.”

95% of YouTube Views Come from Just 5% of Videos — “Of [YouTube’s] 1.1 billion videos, just 5.3 percent (roughly 58.6 million) of videos on YouTube have 10,000 views or more. These videos have generated a cumulative 7.4 trillion views, or about 95% of all views.”

Three More Reasons Why the Supreme Court Needs to Clean up the Mess of Transformative Use — Those three reasons, according to Stephen Carlisle, are the recent decisions in Author’s Guild v. Google, Inc., Katz v. Google, and Galvin v. Illinois Republican Party.

Is Google Books leading researchers astray? — “By not taking into account the relative popularity of texts, Google Books leaves itself open to disproportionate influence from less widely recognized sources. ‘It’s as if you’re giving every work in a library the same weight,’ Dodds said. When an author publishes numerous books about a single character, for example, that character’s name may appear to be far more central to an era’s discourse than it actually was. Dodds pointed me to the example of Star Trek novelizations, which made names like Spock appear with improbable frequency. By contrast, Dodds noted, a long-standing best-seller like A Tale of Two Cities has trouble making a dent at all, even in eras when everyone was reading it.”

CPIP 2015 Fall Conference — The Center for Protection of Intellectual Property has now posted videos of all the panels from its recent fall conference, The IP Platform: Supporting Invention and Inspiration. A must watch!