Bureau Of Economic Analysis Shows Why Copyright Terms Should Be Greatly Diminished | Techdirt

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-04-25

Summary:

"We've pointed a few times in the past to a chart from William Patry's book, looking at how frequently copyright was renewed at the 28 year mark back when copyright (a) required registration and (b) required a 'renewal' at 28 years to keep it another 28 years. The data is somewhat amazing ... As you can see, very few works are renewed after 28 years. Only movies, at 74% are over the 50% mark. Only 35% of music and only 7% of books tells quite a story. It makes it quite clear that even the copyright holders see almost no value in their copyrights after a short period of time. It appears that the Bureau of Economic Analysis is coming to the same conclusion from a different angle. As Matthew Yglesias notes, as part of its effort to recalibrate how it calculates GDP, the BEA is considering money spent on the creation of content an 'investment' in a capital good, which needs to be depreciated over the time period in which it is valuable. Frankly, I'm not convinced this is the smartest way to account for money spent on the creation of content, but either way, the BEA's analysis provides some insight into the standard 'economic life' of various pieces of content, which match up with the chart above in many ways.  'The most ephemeral cultural works turn out to be musical records, which depreciate at a staggering annual rate of 26.7 percent—meaning they earn a huge share of their lifetime income in their first year of release, and only a tiny number of works have a meaningful level of back-catalog sales. Television shows come next, depreciating at a 16.8 percent rate. Then you have books at 12.1 percent. Movies turn out to be far more durable than TV, music, or books, depreciating only at a fairly low 3.8 percent rate.'  While books and music flip flop from the chart above, movies seem to be the only one, in both measurements, that have a particularly long economic life. Yglesias wonders if that's also about to change for movies, especially as studios are forced to move away from windowed releases ... I'm not sure if that's really going to be true, especially since one of the advantages of on-demand systems like Netflix is that they open up a wide back catalog to viewers. Prior to the VCR, that was non-existent, and even with the VCR, the back catalog was limited to what a video store could hold, and old products were regularly on the chopping block. So I could see how movies could still have an extended economic life.  Still, as Andy Howard noted in alerting us to this story, this actually gives us yet another tool for evaluating a more reasonable copyright term ..."

Link:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130423/15252322813/bureau-economic-analysis-shows-why-copyright-terms-should-be-greatly-diminished.shtml

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.copyright oa.books oa.economics_of oa.movies oa.tv

Date tagged:

04/25/2013, 13:44

Date published:

04/25/2013, 09:44