The former editor of the Financial Times, Andrew Gowers, releases a report on the structure of the UK’s intellectual property framework today. One issue under discussion is the extension of copyright terms to 95 years from 50. Lawrence Lessig outlines why this extension is irrelevant from an economic perspective.
The debate will replay the arguments over the US’ Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. Here is the amicus brief against the affectionately known Sonny Bono Act outlining the strong economic arguments against term extension.
Some of my clients favour extension, but I get the impression that laziness and fear are their main reasons for doing so. That should be warning enough that the clamour to extend terms has little to do with supporting impoverished artists (and their offspring). I get the same response when I speak to pharmaceutical firms about the debatable value of our current patent system. These are firms that are meant to be the most innovative of their kind, supporting not only breakthrough scientific research but manufacturing processes enabling the production of cheap drugs. Yet when it comes to thinking innovatively about alternative means of securing incentives to produce such drugs, they are strangely ambivalent.
Whether it’s loss aversion of laziness, the inability of firms to see that there might be a better (=more efficient) way of doing things really makes me doubt whether, for example, the appropriate responses to the climate change problem can be left entirely to the market. This shouldn’t surprise; if firms maximise anything, it’s the returns to their shareholders, not the yet-to-be-conceived inheritors of those returns. And relying on inter-generational concern may be one mechanism for not discounting the future too heavily, but how much do I really care about Baby Boot’s grandchildren?
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