Professor Martin Kretschmer awarded ESRC Fellowship
Date: 4 January 2011
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Professor Martin Kretschmer will be seconded to the UK Intellectual Property Office |
For the academic year 2010/11, Professor Martin Kretschmer will be seconded to the UK Intellectual Property Office (part of the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills) on a prestigious ESRC fellowship. As part of the fellowship, he is undertaking a comparative study of copyright levies.
Abstract ESRC Levy Study
A levy system providing "compensation" for authors, performers and producers for the private copying of copyright materials was first created with the German copyright law of 1965 (UrhG). Levies on copying devices and copying media are now prevalent throughout the EU (with the exception of the UK, Ireland, Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg), in North America (Canada, and to a limited extent the United States) and in Japan. In the EU alone, collection exceeds 500 million Euro per year.
Despite their wide adoption, rationale and economic consequences of levy systems are little understood. It is unclear what incentives, if any, levies are supposed to provide, and who are the precise empirical beneficiaries. It remains unresolved if a levy should be simply analysed as a (regressive) tax, or if there can be efficiencies that are similar to the transaction cost rationale of blanket licences. There may also be dynamic effects, from increased access to copyright materials for follow-on innovation. In addition, a number of non-economic arguments are frequently made, focussing on the reward of creators.
The ESRC fellowship in the Intellectual Property Office examines (i) the economics of different types of pricing (e.g. percentage of revenue, percentage of retail price, per user fee), (ii) issues arising from tax points (e.g. copying media, equipment, traffic), (iii) issues arising from distribution schemes (e.g. between various categories of legal rights, between authors and publishers, between major and minor earners, effects of earning thresholds) and (iv) crossborder trade effects of levy schemes.
