As digital distribution channels continue to grow and internet piracy remains a concern, the issue of copyright is a crucial one. On the one hand, artists have to make a living—and so do their investors. On the other, there are huge societal benefits to the free use and distribution of creative work. Where should the balance lie?
Yes—more would benefit
Rufus Pollock, Founder and President of Open Knowledge and former Mead Fellow in Economics at Cambridge UniversityCopyright terms should be reduced—the exact length is difficult to determine but probably it's somewhere between a few years and 15-20.
Copyright is a time limited monopoly that we grant, with both good and bad characteristics. The good characteristic is that without granting this monopoly people would copy creative work, and therefore not much money would accrue to the creators of the work or, as is often the case, the investors in it. The longer the copyright term, the more money accrues to creators and investors and therefore, in theory, more work gets made. The tradeoff is that this work is then restricted, both to consumers and other artists.
The longer you extend copyright, the benefit for the creator is ever lower because most work makes most of the money it will ever make in its first few years. That means the longer you extend copyright, the less likely you are to incentivise new work; if you extend copyright from five to 10 years, it is unlikely many more books will be written as a result. But it does mean that stuff is then still in copyright that could be freely available for everyone.
To give a very simple argument, the people who lose out, when you extend copyright, are citizens. A very concentrated group of investors stand to gain a lot.
No—Protect our creatives
Sara John, Policy Director at the Creative Industries FederationFirstly, legally I don’t think you can lower copyright terms by this much. We are party to all sorts of international treaties, quite apart from EU legal provisions, which set the term for copyright on different types of works and they all last much longer. The term for a song, for example, is set at the life of the composer plus 70 years in Europe.
The reason for this is that most countries have debated this issue extensively, balancing the important need to protect and incentivise creativity on the one hand, with access on the other. Artists have to be able to make a living from their work and investors in talent have to be able to recoup their investment over a reasonable period of time. Also, you don’t see many copyrighted works being made and then locked up—within a work’s term of copyright there is usually a lot of use going on.
A 14 year term would dramatically undervalue the contribution of artists and the creative industries to the UK—they make up about five per cent of our economy—and to society.
This week's Big Question is edited by Josh Lowe
