BU academic awarded a Grant under the Google Research Awards program
4 July 2011
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When Works Fall Into the Public Domain: An Experiment in the Market for Audio Books. |
Professor Paul Heald has been awarded a Grant under the Google Research Awards program. The project is entitled: “Do Bad Things Happen When Works Fall Into the Public Domain: An Experiment in the Market for Audio Books”
Abstract: The Google Books controversy demonstrates the importance of the legal line between copyright and the public domain, but due to retroactive copyright term extension, no works have fallen into the public domain in the United States since 1998. Around the world, other countries are considering term extension, and Congress will be considering further extensions here soon. The primary reason offered by supporters of term extension is the claim that bad things happen when copyrighted works fall into the public domain. In two prior empirical studies, I have shown that bestselling books from 1913-23 did not suffer from under-exploitation when they fell into the public domain and that bestselling musical compositions from 1913–23 did not suffer from either under–or over–use when they fell into the public domain. Neither study, however, was able to test a final critical claim made by term extension advocates—that derivative works produced from public domain works will be of low quality. We propose a study of the audio book market in order test whether the quality of recordings of public domain books differs from the quality of copyrighted books and whether any quality differences affect the value of the underlying work (as predicted by some economists). Preliminary data provide evidence that freezing the public domain is inefficient and counter-productive.
