The Progressive Economics Forum

The Globe’s Download Decade started out well but by the end turned into a propaganda arm for big corporate rights holders. Surprise, surprise. This issue is all about who gets what in the digital age, and for the most part it is the already super-rich pressing the case to maintain and increase their revenue streams [...]

Most people I know do not watch TV in real time anymore but use bit torrent to download what they want to watch, when they want to watch it, and without commercial breaks. While charges of piracy have loomed over that activity, this practice is arguably legal right now in Canada – one of the [...]

Anti-trust lawyer David Balto, with the Center for American Progress, recently made the case against Ticketmaster’s proposed merger with LiveNation in testimony to the US Congress. The testimony also provides an excellent summary of Ticketmaster’s existing monopoly, some of which I excerpt below:
Let’s be straightforward about one transparent fact: Ticketmaster is a monopolist and exercises [...]

Of all the high-flyers and assorted fraudsters now coming down to earth, this one is just too rich and comical to pass by. 
Owen Lippert, now scandalized as the wholesale plagiarizer from Australian Prime Minister John Howard in a speech he wrote for Stephen Harper, was the former Director of the Law and Markets Project at [...]

This story in the weekend Globe says that Hollywood raked in about $4 billion in revenues over the summer. A good chunk of this was Batman, with about half a billion in ticket sales (personally, I thought the movie was awful, apart from the stunning performance of The Joker).
So it is pretty safe to say [...]

You wouldn’t know it from proponents of Canada’s proposed Bill C-61, but the music industry is thriving. The main reason is that musicians can control live performances, and make good money doing it. “Pirated” distribution can create an audience willing to play $40 (ranging up to $200) to see a live show.
As Alan Kreuger points [...]

With the Conservatives’ “Born in the USA” Copyright Act now tabled, the fur is flying. A year after leaping to the defence of the oil and gas industry, Terrance Corcoran has got Big US Media’s back (does Terry ever stand up for anyone but the wealthy and powerful?). As always, Michael Giest, who knows way [...]

It is with considerable disgust that we watch the Conservatives introduce the US entertainment industry’s wet dream of legislation to amend copyright laws in its favour. Without any evidence that the super-profits being reaped by Big Media have been adversely affected by file sharing. Without any consultation with Canadians. Without any demonstrable benefit to Canadians [...]

… says Paul Krugman. And I’m in a session at the CEA confence on Keynes where the original quote just came up.
Nothing new here to readers of this blog, but I like that Krugman is using his pulpit to deliver the message at a time when the Canadian government is on the verge of introducing [...]

Initiatives like the Public Library of Science have began to challenge the scientific publishers’ monopoly over the dissemination of research but now that high profile institutions like Harvard are coming on board with their own open access policies it really looks like the end of an era.
Earlier this year, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences [...]

As I mused yesterday about Facebook’s lack of respect for privacy in a bid to make billions, along comes a story putting Facebook’s valuation at $15 billion. But I’m not convinced Facebook is poised to take over the world just yet. Myspace once sat on top of the social networking world, and I’m wondering whether [...]

Copyright lawyer Howard Knopf, writing in the Hill Times, summarizes what he expects from the Conservatives in updating the Copyright Act to attack file sharing, all to the benefit of a US entertainment industry that has been feigning injury better than any elite soccer player. Knopf also points out many areas where Canadian copyright law [...]

A lot of people assume that file sharing is a bad thing for artists and their recording labels. This independent study done for Industry Canada, by Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz, suggests exactly the opposite: file sharing increases exposure and can increase record sales. Below is the abstract, and after that some interesting post-study commentary [...]

Relentlessly Progressive Economics (old site at progecon.wordpress.com) was suspended earlier today by WordPress due to a complaint about copyright violation. We are working to cleanse our posts so that they are within the definition of fair use (though this is contested terrain).
Wikipedia’s article on fair use of copyrighted material is here.

Copyright has always been pitched as striking a balance between the rights of creators to make a living off their work and the rights of the general public and future generations to benefit from that work. In recent decades, as big corporations have replaced actual creators as owners of many copyrighted works, the balance has [...]

Over at Wired, Leander Kahney comments on this week’s deal between Apple and EMI to sell EMI’s catalogue free of digital rights management (DRM):
How Steve Jobs Calls the Tunes
Steve Jobs’ new partnership with EMI to sell music without copy protection is a lesson in how to wield power in the digital age.
Carefully and strategically, Jobs [...]

The authors of this paper address the relationship between (overly rigid) intellectual property laws, in copyright and patents, and externalities (spillovers), with a rethink of the assumptions driving the economics.
Spillovers
MARK A. LEMLEY
Stanford Law School
BRETT M. FRISCHMANN
Loyola University of Chicago - Law School
Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 321
Columbia Law Review, Vol. 100, No. [...]

We have been picking on copyright a lot recently, but we should not neglect patents, that other arm of “intellectual property”. Like copyright, patents confer monopoly power. They have little to do with a “free market” but everything to do with real-world capitalism. In his monthly column, Joseph Stiglitz makes the case against patents with [...]

John Ibbitson leaps to the defence of the US entertainment industry and their bid to hold back the tide of history. It is not clear at all what harms are being caused by the existing Copyright Act and why it should be fixed to make rich US entertainment corporations even richer.
To channel Dean Baker, copyright [...]

Adam Frucci at Gizmodo has it out for the Recording Industry Association of America, the good folks who like to sue teenagers and students in order to protect their lucrative oligopoly. This nonsense may soon be coming to Canada if changes to the Copyright under contemplation in Ottawa win the day (introduced initially by the [...]

Much of the outrage about file sharing (aka “piracy”) has come from movie studios and record companies, but not much at all from TV networks. Of course, they do put out their product for free, albeit bundled with advertising. Lots of people record these shows and watch them at their convenience, often skipping the adversiting. [...]

Below is Steve Jobs’ article, playing on some of the same themes as Barlow. But without the grand conclusion that Barlow espouses: musicians can control live performances, and make good money doing it. “Pirated” distribution can create an audience willing to play $40 (ranging up to $200) to see a live show.
We already see this [...]

Arun Dubois’ posts on copyright and intellectual property have me digging back a decade to my days as a bureaucrat at Industry Canada in the Information and Communications Technology branch. I remember reading this essay by John Perry Barlow, published in Wired back in 1996 or so, and finding it really compelling. Reading it again [...]

This is good news and good timing. With Steve Jobs on side, maybe the folks at Heritage/Industry will reconsider their quaint attachment to rigid intellectual property rights measures when they set about drafting amendments to the copyright act. Dare to dream…

The recent flurry of stories about Canada’s copyright laxity (see below) suggests that the “rights holder” community is softening up the Canadian public for a strong dose of copyright medicine. Want to see first-run movies at your local theatre just like everyone else in North America? Better support some tough new copyright (and criminal code) [...]

Andrew Brown says the dark side of Microsof’s new Vista operating system is a nasty digital rights management system. Oh the relentless greed of the movie industry. In cahoots with Microsoft they are seeking to guarantee their billions in profits and to ensure Tom Cruise can continue to make $20 million a movie.

Making the [...]

Not sure how this one was missed by the filters. Thanks to Paul Willcocks for the snag:
… [T]he Harper government - acting on an initiative started by the Liberals - pushed up health-care costs by handing big pharmaceutical companies a three-year extension on drug patents, preventing low-cost competition. The new rules affect about 25 per [...]