more IP stuff Stuart Buck calls attention to a William Landes and Richard Posner paper on "indefinitely renewable copyrights." Having given it a quick glance, I have several comments. First, the paper claims that economists would all advocate that

"so far as is feasible, all valuable resources, including copyrightable works, should be owned, in order to create incentives for their efficient exploitation and to avoid overuse."

But I don't think this is true. As I posted in Stuart's blog, a copyright monopoly is economically no different from other sorts of monopoly. So, to the extent it exists, the exclusive right to sell hamburgers is "a valuable resource," just as the exclusive right to the text of Moby Dick is "a valuable resource." And yet, I don't think you'd find too many economists who'd argue that we ought to give out hamburger monopolies in the interest of "efficient exploitation." Later on they claim that

"because the scope of copyright protection is, as noted earlier, very narrow, the size of the deadweight loss created by copyright protection is likely to be relatively small."

But I think that the Napster phenomenon proves otherwise. People have downloaded billions of copyrighted songs, demonstrating that they assign them some value. And yet many of these downloaders would never have bought the corresponding albums. This, to me, seems evidence of a large deadweight loss, if copyright were strictly enforced. Their next point is that public domain works would suffer from "congestion effects" -- if anyone could create Mickey Mouse stories, then Mickey Mouse would become useless as a character and society would lose out. But I don't think this is fair. Imagine I were to argue that "if anyone could create detective stories, then detective stories would become useless as a genre, and society would lose out." You'd find it ludicrous, of course, because we judge detective stories not just by the fact that they're detective stories but also by considering the author, reviews, friends' recommendations, and other factors. In a world where anyone could create a Mickey Mouse story, we're free to do the same. If this seems wrong, think about Robin Hood. Anyone (Mel Brooks, Kevin Costner, etc...) can create his own version of a Robin Hood story, and yet the concept of Robin Hood still has value. We judge each Robin Hood project on its own merits. It's true that such judging is not costless, but markets are good at providing information, and I can't imagine the cost would be too high. Next they claim that without renewable copyrights, there is too little incentive to republish old, public-domain works. But the advent of e-books, Project Gutenberg, and print-on-demand technologies makes this concern irrelevant in most cases. Republication is dirt-cheap and can be done at will, one book at a time. Finally, the authors parrot the record industry line:

"In the absence of copyright protection -- and here we are speaking just of protection against the copying of the sound recordings themselves -- unauthorized copying of the hit records will drive their price down to their cost of manufacture and distribution and leave nothing for covering the costs incurred in developing and promoting recordings of new songs and new performers. Copyright protection enables the record company to earn enough money on the hits to cover both their costs and the production and marketing costs of the many failures."

This is true, of course, given current business models which are premised on copyright. In the absence of copyright, it's almost certain that different business models would arise. Landes and Posner are much smarter than I am, which makes me reluctant to pick holes. On the other hand, these are all issues I've given a lot of thought to.