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Can the NYT Talk About the Economics of Copyright?
It is remarkably how an outfit that imagines itself so deeply committed to free trade is so incredibly oblivious to protectionism when it has the effect of redistributing income upward. The court order telling Google to hand over the Internet viewing records of tens of millions of people might be a good time to discuss the economics of copyright.
The point is that we incur enormous inefficiencies in the form of monopoly pricing and extraordinary enforcement costs, and now this invasion of individual privacy, all in order to get a relatively small amount of money into the hands of creative workers. We can think of much better ways to finance creative work. It would be difficult to imagine a worse system -- will the NYT ever talk about the issue?
--Dean Baker
COMMENTS (2)
Dean, what is your take on scientific journals? In effect all the work is done by scientists that provide the science as well as often nicely layouted texts and figures, while universities and other science institutes pay incredible sums for for example elsevier journals. Personally, i'd say put it all on the internet, but then there may be some problems with the peer review process
Posted by: Anonymous | July 4, 2008 7:44 AM
Anonymous,
i would say absolutely put it on the Internet. We can arrange any number of mechanisms for review of material either before or after it is posted. People can, and often do, post material before publication. It would be a simple matter to arrange some credentialing system that would say something like "this paper has been approved by the Journal for Good Science." This would make everyone's life so much easier.
Posted by: Dean Baker | July 4, 2008 10:20 AM