Copyright is a key driver of the creative industries and a cornerstone of modern economic activity. At its core, copyright protection must balance a fundamental trade-off between encouraging investment in creative products and ensuring their access. Weak copyright protection risks undermining creators' incentives to innovate, while overly strong protection can discourage the dissemination of ideas.
Despite its crucial importance, we empirically know very little about the optimal level of copyright protection, and current copyright laws tend to reflect historical precedents rather than rigorous economic analysis. Digitization has reshaped both cost and revenue structures, further affecting the trade-off at the heart of copyright. RECODE investigates these economic dynamics in three parts.
The first and fundamental part focuses on determining the optimal copyright term in the music, book, and movie industries, accounting for the distinctive aspects of each sector. The analysis addresses the inherent uncertainty creators face in predicting the success of their works—a defining feature of the creative industries with significant yet unexplored implications for optimal copyright protection.
The second part investigates how digitization has affected music reuse and the resulting information spillovers that drive demand for reused works, informing the design of the optimal copyright term as well as fair-use provisions.
The third part examines how digitization has transformed news-content licensing, including the ways news is produced, distributed, accessed, and monetized. It studies how evolving technologies, market relationships, and policy frameworks affect licensing arrangements, news consumption, and competition among outlets.
Drawing on a broad set of empirical tools, RECODE aims to break new ground in research and deliver impactful, policy-relevant insights.