Quantifying the Copyright-Innovation Interference
The constitution empowers Congress to promote the useful and the expressive arts, which Congress does through the laws governing patents and copyrights. But, promoting one may sometimes retard the other. This happens in the context of new technologies of copying and dissemination, such as the photocopier, VTR, the MP3 player, and file-sharing networks. Imposing copyright liability on the makers and users of these technologies encourages copyright owners but may discourage innovators. Shielding such makers and users from liability encourages technological innovation but may retard expressive creativity. How should we strike this trade-off, either in general or in particular cases?
This question has long been a major issue in copyright law and scholarship. To know what the right policy is, we should have some sense of the degree to which incentives to create content are diminished, if at all, in the face of the new technology. Indeed, much empirical work surrounding the file-sharing litigation has studied the effect file-sharing had on music sales. This body of literature contains diverse views, and the debate on the empirics is sometimes as heated as the one on the theory and policy side.