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New Scholarship: Copyright as Welfare
Posted by Steven Wu on Tuesday, February 03 @ 22:18:34 EST Copyright
Professor Tom Bell has posted an article entitled "Authors' Welfare: Copyright as a Statutory Mechanism for Redistributing Rights," analogizing copyright to welfare. From the abstract:
Both welfare and copyright primarily aim to correct the market's failure to sufficiently support a particular class of beneficiaries. Both encourage rights-based claims to the entitlements that they create, too. The welfare system and the copyright system each uses statutory mechanisms to redistribute rights - rights to wealth in the first instance, rights to chattels and persons in the second - from the general public to particular beneficiary classes - the poor and authors, respectively. Each also includes special exceptions designed to avoid inefficient or inequitable redistributions. The charitable gift deduction and other tax code provisions limit the welfare system's scope, whereas copyright law offers fair use and other defenses to infringement claims. Perhaps those and other similarities between welfare and copyright mean little. After considering various critiques, however, the paper concludes that we can learn important lessons from understanding copyright as a statutory mechanism for redistributing rights. Most notably, understanding copyright as a form of authors' welfare suggests the need for, and potential shape of, reforms to end copyright as we know it.
 
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Re: New Scholarship: Copyright as Welfare (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Wednesday, February 04 @ 21:38:42 EST
I'm an author of more than 100 trade books, and I can tell you this much: anyone who thinks that copyright provides welfare-like compensation to authors has been smoking something. Copyright provides welfare-like compensation to COPYRIGHT HOLDERS, who are NOT (in general) authors, but rather a small number of corporations who act in concert to deprive authors and other creative people of anything approaching fair compensation for their creative efforts. Has Professor Bell -- or any of the rest of you legal theoreticians -- bothered to speak to authors or recording artists lately? If you should be willing to slum around and actually talk to creative people, you'll discover that many of us have concluded that the system is so badly tilted AGAINST creative people that what's left is best described as a pathetic joke - a trap for losers. Have you looked at a publication contract lately? A recording contract?


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