Chapter 9

An Evidence-Free Zone?

• IP policy is often developed without empirical evidence of its effects

• Why?– Historical process– Intuitions drawn from physical property– Natural right beliefs

• Compare to drug trials

Owning Facts

• Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service– Rural created local telephone directories– Feist licensed local directories to create regional

directories– Rural copied Feist’s directory (OCR?) and then

corrected the data and added some missing addresses

• In 1991, Supreme Court ruled that mere alphabetical listings cannot be copyrighted

Empirical Evidence: US and Europe

• United States– No ownership of facts– Database companies push for

IP protection but– Databases of facts are not copyrightable

• Europe– 1996 Database Directive protects databases– European Commission requires review of new

policy (e.g. requires a study of effects)

What types of evidence?

• What are the relative rate of growth for the database industry?

• Are the beneficiaries of protection databases that would not have existed otherwise?

• Is there innovation in the database industry?• European Assessment combined quantitative

results with results of how the database companies liked the directive

Growth?

• US database industry has grown 25x since 1979 at a fairly constantrate

• Europe had a one-time spike in database companies (many failed) and went back to pre-directive growth rate

• Ratio of database production (compared with US) went from 1:2 in 1996 to 1:3 in 2004

Databases Seeking Protection?

• Examples:– Web sites linking to domain-specific

resources– Popular music charts– Collection of poems– Advertisements– Headings for news stories

• Indication that the boundary for protection is not drawn correctly

Innovation?

• Scientists claim the new rights – Block the aggregation of data– Inhibit the replication of studies– Make difficult the assessment of published articles

• But it is hard to provide concrete examples• Also, there are a number of factors different in

the US and Europe so causality is not simple to infer

Are Database Rights Necessary?

• Case of legal databases• All court case documents are immediately put

into the public domain• There are two big legal database providers– Reed Elsevier’s Lexis Nexis– Thompson Publishing’s Westlaw

• Both companies bought the databases after the 1991 Supreme Court ruling

Westlaw v. Hyperlaw

• Competitors to Westlaw – copied the public domain text from Westlaw’s

data (on-line or CDROM)– indicated Westlaw’s page numbers as they had

become the de-facto standard for citation• Hyperlaw won lawsuit– Court ruled that page numbers are not sufficiently

original enough to invoke copyright

Westlaw v. Hyperlaw (2)

• Westlaw continued to improve their service, adding helpful navigational options and additional copyrighted text interpreting the cases

• Hyperlaw went out of business, Westlaw generates a nice profit

• Lessons– Database did not need IP

protection– Competition led to improved

service

The Value of Public Data

• Another comparison between Europe and US– European countries sell the data they collect to

offset the cost of production– US sells the data for the cost of replication

• Both models make some sense– Wouldn’t it be great if government was more self

sufficient and did not need as much tax revenue– Maybe all roads should be toll roads

The Case of Weather Data

• Europe– Invests 9.5 billion Euros in

collecting weather data– Gets back 68 billion in

economic value– A sevenfold multiplier

• United States– Invests 19 billion Euros in collecting weather data– Gets back 750 billion in economic value– A 39-fold multiplier

• Information as infrastructure for more efficient activity and for new services

Gowers Review of Copyright in UK

• Evaluating likely effects of extending copyright term over recordings by 50 years

• Found that the perceived benefit to an artist at time of recording is worth 3-9 % of eventual value– Report found this marginal value is not going to increase

innovation– Cost of orphaned works

• Report also found no social value to increasing terms over existing works– No increase in media migration– But natural right arguments still have a hold over policy

makers

Chapter 10

Bias in Human Decision Making

• Pick between the Wild-West Web and the controlled Web with edited content from well-known providers.

• Pick between software that anyone anywhere could change and software from a well-known respectable software firm.

• Pick between building the greatest reference work ever by assembling a mass of paid experts or waiting for hobbyists to volunteer content and search engines to organize and rank.

• People overestimate chances of loss (and detriment) and underestimate chances of gain (and benefit)– Remember the 20/20 downside vision

Information Environmentalism

• Not a hippy, free-love, the land is owned by everyone environmentalism– IP rights are important for

many activities– The bounds are important

to get right• Need a narrative that makes it clear the costs as well

as the benefits from IP policy– One that makes clear the value of the public domain– This can balance the natural right intuitions people have

based on experiences with physical property

Computers and New Media:A Review

Media Studies

• Theory of Media– Marshall McLuhan

• “The Medium is the Message”– The same content in different

media is not the same– Hot and cold media– Media composed of media

Hamlet on the Holodeck

• Reaction to new media• Incunabula• Immersion, Engagement, Flow• Navigation and Agency• Transformation• Support for Authoring• Eliza and Computer

Agents

Text

Music

Images and Video

Characters and Robots

DRM and IP

New Media

Reminder

• Go rate this course• Hope you enjoyed it