MIT Economist: Here's How Copyright Laws Impoverish Wikipedia

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/mit-economist-heres-how-copyright-laws-impoverish-wikipedia/259970/

by iProject • 14 years ago

78 33 14 years ago

theatlantic.com

john_horton• 14 years ago

A conceptually similar paper by another MIT economist looked at how the IP protection afforded to different genes at the time of sequencing affected follow-on research. Genens that were immediately in the public domain stimulated about about 20-30% more research/product development than comparable Celera-sequence genes that had IP protection. The paper is here: http://economics.mit.edu/files/6803

_delirium• 14 years ago

Another source of imbalance here is countries being stingy with their government-created works. You end up with a larger percentage of Wikipedia articles, and therefore also anything that draws from Wikipedia as a source, being illustrated by US-government-sourced photos than should otherwise be the case, since U.S. federal govt works are public domain. It's slowly changing in a few cases, though, with initiatives like: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bundesarchiv

tommorris• 14 years ago

Another example at the moment is the UK government are slowly opening up with the Open Government License.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:OGL

SagelyGuru2• 14 years ago

It is an obvious foregone conclusion that a copyrighted image is going to be used less than one that is in the public domain.

Given the administrative hassles of getting a permission, not to mention having to make royalties payments, all ensure that this is the case. Surely, to stop people using the image or whatever is the very purpose of copyright in the first place?

Where is the utility and novelty in 'research' like this?

pavel_lishin2• 14 years ago

> Surely, to stop people using the image or whatever is the very purpose of copyright in the first place?

I thought the purpose was to financially compensate the original creators of the image or whatever

slowpoke• 14 years ago

Actually, the original intention was governmental censorship.

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

You cannot say "but it's obvious" on a court a law when there's a lawyer in the other side being payed to to point you're wrong. I'm pretty sure the MAFIAA lobbyists will try to make a compelling case why it isn't obvious. So this might become useful when there's an IP reform bill circulating around.

SilasX2• 14 years ago

What's more, you can't fairly assess the full effect unless you account for the usable content that exists out there and would not exist but for copyright laws.

I know it's popular on sites like this one to act like copyright laws are strictly bad, that no work's creation ever depends on IP laws, etc., but an honest assessment would be that some works require IP to exist, while some do not.

So, after creation, copyright hurts Wikipedia's ability to incorporate a work, while some works would not exist but for copyright. Which effect is more significant, and is that a net positive or negative for Wikipedia?

Well, that would take real research.

You know, the kind this economist didn't do.

true_religion2• 14 years ago

Saying something is a negative doesn't mean that it is in all counts bad.

A common argument is that more creativity is restricted by copyright than is enabled by it.

That makes copyright a poor trade off.

majormajor2• 14 years ago

"a copyrighted image is going to be used less than one that is in the public domain"

That wasn't the conclusion.

The conclusion was that images are worth more, in terms of updates and visits, to Wikipedia articles than text.

This is still a conclusion that will doubtless have its share of people calling it obvious, but it's one I haven't seen quantified like this before. And in the case of baseball players in particular, in theory an image doesn't add nearly as much as their stats and team/championship information.

gmrple• 14 years ago

"But Nagaraj found was that the availability of public domain material dramatically improved the article's images. Before the digitization, players from between '44 and '64 had an average of .183 pictures on their articles. The '64 to '84 group had about .158 pictures. But after digitization, those numbers dramatically changed: there were 1.15 pictures on each of the older group's articles -- but only .667 in the new group. More recent players, covered by privately-owned parts of Baseball Digest, had half as many images on their pages as did old-timers."

Should that be 0.0667?

lubujackson• 14 years ago

So for one specific example where there was one data source partially copywritten, the open content was used and the copywritten information wasn't. Thus, sweeping conclusion about copyright law.

And this is why economists are useless.

rhizome2• 14 years ago

It's also why generalizations are awesome!

derleth2• 14 years ago

> copywritten

Copyrighted. It's about rights, specifically, the rights to copy and authorize copying.

chris_wot4• 14 years ago

Right != write

Dylan168073• 14 years ago

This isn't about copyright, really. Wikipedia has a faction that dislikes fair-use non-free images. This faction is largely political in nature. It's not about the actual laws.

derleth2• 14 years ago

> Wikipedia has a faction that dislikes fair-use non-free images.

... because Wikipedia can be sued for using them, and fair use is a very, very bad thing to try and rely on in an actual court. 'Fair use' is whatever a judge says it is, which isn't something you can rely on going your way.

chris_wot4• 14 years ago

It is about the laws. Fair use is a very restrictive use for copyrighted images - you can only use the if you transform them significantly in some way, reduce the image quality so that you don't reduce the value for the original owner, or use the in a not for profit medium as fair use tends to be more friendly to this sort of thing.

None of these things are really viable for Wikipedia. Fair use is a necessary evil, but when they can replaced with a free image then that is what is done!

Dylan168073• 14 years ago

The problem is when images are replaced with nothing or with far inferior images. I agree that free should be prioritized when the two images are in the same ballpark of quality.

majormajor2• 14 years ago

And in the US, fair use is an affirmative defense, with the burden of proof on the defendent. It can't keep you from getting sued in the same way a completely free image would.

adrianN• 14 years ago

In Germany there is no such thing as fair use. Either the images are free or they are not in the German Wikipedia.

MIT Economist: Here's How Copyright Laws Impoverish Wikipedia

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