In the language of computer programmers, the issue here is "does it scale?" Can we generalize anything from this limited example? How many types of production, innovation, and research fit into the model I have just described? After all, for many innovations and inventions one needs hardware, capital investment, and large-scale, real-world data collection—stuff, in its infinite recalcitrance and facticity. Maybe the open source model provides a workaround to the individual incentives problem, but that is not the only problem. And how many types of innovation or cultural production are as modular as software? Is open source software a paradigm case of collective innovation that helps us to understand open source software and not much else? 44
Again, I think this is a good question, but it may be the wrong one. My own guess is that an open source method of production is far more common than we realize. "Even before the Internet" (as some of my students have taken to saying portentously), science, law, education, and musical genres all developed in ways that are markedly similar to the model I have described. The marketplace of ideas, the continuous roiling development in thought and norms that our political culture spawns, owes much more to the distributed, nonproprietary model than it does to the special case of commodified innovation that we think about in copyright and patent. Not that copyright and patent are unimportant in the process, but they may well be the exception rather than the norm. Commons-based production of ideas is hardly unfamiliar, after all. 45
In fact, all the mottos of free software development have their counterparts in the theory of democracy and open society; "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is merely the most obvious example. Karl Popper would have cheered.14 The importance of open source software is not that it introduces us to a wholly new idea. It is that it makes us see clearly a very old idea. With open source the technology was novel, the production process transparent, and the result of that process was a "product" which outcompeted other products in the marketplace. "How can this have happened? What about the tragedy of the commons?" we asked in puzzlement, coming only slowly to the realization that other examples of commons-based, nonproprietary production were all around us. 46
Still, this does not answer the question of whether the model can scale still further, whether it can be applied to solve problems in other spheres. To answer that question we would need to think more about the modularity of other types of inventions. How much can they be broken down into chunks suitable for distribution among a widespread community? Which forms of innovation have some irreducible need for high capital investment in distinctly nonvirtual components—a particle accelerator or a Phase III drug trial? Again, my guess is that the increasing migration of the sciences toward data- and processing-rich models makes much more of innovation and discovery a potential candidate for the distributed model. Bioinformatics and computational biology, the open source genomics project,15 the BioBricks Foundation I mentioned in the last chapter, the possibility of distributed data scrutiny by lay volunteers16—all of these offer intriguing glances into the potential for the future. Finally, of course, the Internet is one big experiment in, as Benkler puts it, peer-to-peer cultural production.17 47
If these questions are good ones, why are they also the wrong ones? I have given my guesses about the future of the distributed model of innovation. My own utopia has it flourishing alongside a scaled-down, but still powerful, intellectual property regime. Equally plausible scenarios see it as a dead end or as the inevitable victor in the war of productive processes. These are all guesses, however. At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. " 'Free' as in 'free speech,' " Richard Stallman says, not "free as in 'free beer.' "18 But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and low- or no-cost. When the marginal cost of reproduction is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn't charge, the world looks a little different.19 This is at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice. Yet that is what we are doing. The Database Protection Bills and Directives, which extend intellectual property rights to the layer of facts;20 the efflorescence of software patents;21 the UCITA-led validation of shrinkwrap licenses that bind third parties;22 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anticircumvention provisions23—the point of all of these developments is not merely that they make the peer-to-peer model difficult, but that in many cases they rule it out altogether. I will assert this point here, rather than argue for it, but I think it can be (and has been) demonstrated quite convincingly.24 48
The point is, then, that there is a chance that a new (or old, but underrecognized) method of production could flourish in ways that seem truly valuable—valuable to free speech, innovation, scientific discovery, the wallets of consumers, to what William Fisher calls "semiotic democracy,"25 and, perhaps, valuable to the balance between joyful creation and drudgery for hire. True, it is only a chance. True, this theory's scope of operation and sustainability are uncertain. But why would we want to foreclose it? That is what the recent expansions of intellectual property threaten to do. And remember, these expansions were dubious even in a world where we saw little or no possibility of the distributed production model I have described, where discussion of network effects had yet to reach the pages of The New Yorker,26 and where our concerns about the excesses of intellectual property were simply the ones that Jefferson, Madison, and Macaulay gave us so long ago. 49
LEARNING FROM THE SHARING ECONOMY 50
Accept for the sake of argument that the free software community actually works, actually produces high-quality products capable of competing in the market with proprietary alternatives. Concede for a moment that the adoption of Creative Commons licenses shows there are millions of creators out there who want to share their works with others. Many of those creators even want to allow the world to build on their material. Indeed, let us concede that the whole history of the Web, from Wikipedia to the obsessive and usefully detailed sites created on everything from Vikings to shoe polishes, shows a desire to share one's knowledge, to build on the work of others one has never met. These efforts are remarkably varied. Some are ultimately aimed at profit—even if their results are free. Think of IBM's open source initiatives or musicians who release Creative Commons- licensed work in order to get more club gigs. Some are provided as a volunteer act of benevolence or civic duty, even if they "compete" with expensive proprietary alternatives. Think of Wikipedia or MIT's OpenCourseWare. When the infrastructure for this collaboration does not exist, it gets assembled—and quickly. Both the GPL and Creative Commons are examples. Accept all of this. So what? 51
Lesson number one comes from the nonprofit activities—everything from Wikipedia to Web sites created by enthusiasts. People like to create and wish to share. In many cases they will do so without financial reward. A surprising amount of useful, creative, or expressive activity is generated without any financial incentive at all. 52
Should this cause us to throw out the economic case for copyrights? No. But it should lead us to reassess it. As I explained in Chapter 1, copyright provides an incentive for two distinct activities. First, it offers an incentive to create the work in the first place. The author of Windows for Dummies or Harry Potter gets a right to exclude others from copying the work, a right that he or she can sell in the marketplace. The goal is to offer a financial reason to devote time to this particular creative activity. It is this incentive that is most often cited when attempting to persuade policy makers to expand protection. Second, it offers an incentive to distribute the work—to typeset and print large quantities of the work and to sell it to bookstores, or to broadcast it, or put it on movie screens. 53
Each medium is economically different, of course. The economics of the feature film are different from those of the book, the magazine, or the operating system. Thus, we have never had very good figures on the relative importance of these incentives. We can only guess at how much of the incentive from copyright goes to encouraging creation and how much to distribution. Until recently, most types of distribution demanded higher levels of capital. The industry structure that resulted often consisted of creators who worked as wage or contract labor for distributors—either never acquiring copyright in their work in the first place or immediately transferring that copyright to their employers. Because distribution was expensive, our experience with material generated for fun or out of a love of sharing was an essentially private and local one. You might have a neighbor's photocopied sheet of baking recipes that worked well at high altitudes, or of fishing techniques that worked well on a particular lake, a song that a friend created for a special occasion, or a short story you wrote for your kids—and then typed up for them to tell to theirs. Financial incentives were not needed to encourage the creation of the work, but the cost of distribution dramatically limited its dissemination. 54
The single most dramatic thing that the Web has done by lowering the cost of communication and distribution, at the same moment that other electronic tools lowered the cost of production, is to make this local and private activity a global and public one. Someone, somewhere, will have written the guide to fishing on that lake, baking at that altitude, washing windows, or treating stings from Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish. Someone will have taken a photo of the Duke Chapel or explained the history, economics, and chemistry of shoe polish or distilling. Someone might even have created a great class on music theory or C???programming. Someone will have written a handy little program to manage DNS requests on a local network. Bizarrely, at least as far as the economists were concerned, these people all wanted to share what they had made. Because of the genius of search engines, and the implicit peer-review function that those engines deduce from patterns of links to pages, I can find that material when I need it. 55
True, much of the material on the Web is inane or insane, confused, badly written, tendentious, and inaccurate. (It should be noted that this is hardly a problem confined to the Web or volunteer-generated material. Personally, I would not want People magazine or Fox News in a time capsule to represent my civilization. But some of the material on the Web is clearly worse.) Yes, Wikipedia is occasionally inaccurate—though in one test in Nature it stacked up well against the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it is obviously much more encyclopedic in its coverage. But all of this misses the point. 56
Consider how your expectations about information retrieval have changed in the last fifteen years. We now simply assume that questions about a piece of architecture, a bit of local history, a recipe, or the true author of a song can all be answered within seconds. We have forgotten what it is like to be routinely in ignorance because of the unavailability of some piece of information. One podcaster I talked to called it being a member of "the right-click generation": "When I am walking around and I see a building, I almost feel as though I ought to be able to 'right click' it and have the architect's name pop up." Consider that it now seems normal for a gay Iraqi man in Baghdad to have a blog that offers hundreds of thousands of readers around the world a literate and touching account of the American occupation from a perspective entirely different from that provided by the mainstream press.27 We think it normal for a person of moderate resources to be able to speak to the world from a war zone, whether or not he is affiliated with a newspaper or credentialed by a corporation. 57
These examples are not the end of the process. Our methods of sorting, ranking, and verifying the material generated are still evolving. They may improve even beyond this point. We are only fifteen years into this particular experiment, after all. And a huge amount of this material is produced by our fellow citizens without the profit motive. 58
Does this mean that we no longer need copyright or patent protection to encourage the production and distribution of creative work? No. The fishing tips are great, but I still might buy a handsomely illustrated guide to take on the lake with me or, even better, just stay at home and read A River Runs Through It. The New Yorker, and not a sheaf of printouts from the Web, still sits on my coffee table, though much of the high-quality content I read comes to me online, for free, from strangers who are generating it for pleasure, not profit, or who profit from open sharing, not closed control. The online blogosphere provides a vital counterpoint to mainstream media, but it exists in a symbiotic—some would say parasitic—relationship with that media and the network of professional news gatherers for which it pays. Some of the most interesting open source production methods actually rely on copyright. Even if they did not, open source production would not suffice to run our pharmaceutical industry (though it might help with certain stages of the drug discovery process). 59
Still, just as it would be silly to dismiss the importance of intellectual property based on our experience of blogs and Wikipedia and open source software, it would be equally silly to underestimate what the Web has taught us. The Web has enabled an astonishing flowering of communication and expression, an astounding democratization of creativity. We have learned just how strong, and how useful, is the human urge to express, communicate, invent, and create—provided the barriers to sharing are lowered. These are the very things that copyright and patent are supposed to encourage. For us to portray the Web—as the Internet Threat story line does—as predominantly a threat to creativity is simply perverse. For us to base our policies only on that notion would be a tragedy. We might end up stultifying one of the greatest explosions of human creativity the world has ever seen by treating it as an unimportant marginal case and instead designing our rules around the production processes of commercial culture in the late twentieth century. 60
The shape of our copyright and to a lesser extent our patent system comes from a world in which almost all large-scale distribution was an expensive, capital-intensive enterprise. The roles of gatekeeper and financier, producer and assembler, distributor and advertiser, tended naturally to coalesce into vertically integrated firms or symbiotic commercial partnerships. Those firms were presumed to be the proxy for the public interest when it came to intellectual property policy. Who would know better than they what was needed? Occasionally, device manufacturers would provide a counterweight—as in the Sony case—where the defense of a particular "consumer freedom" actually created a market for a complementary product. Artists and authors might be trotted out as appealing spokespersons, though the laws that were made only sporadically reflected their economic and artistic interests. Librarians and educational institutions had influence at the edges. Most of the time, though, it was the assemblers and distributors of content whose voices and assumptions about markets would be heard. 61
Out of this pattern of habit and influence, and out of much deeper notions about authorship and invention that I have explored elsewhere, developed an ideology, a worldview. Call it maximalism. Its proponents sincerely believed in it and pursued it even when it did not make economic sense. (Think how lucky the movie industry is that it lost the Sony case.) It has been the subject of this book. Its tenets are that intellectual property is just like physical property, that rights need to increase proportionately as copying costs decrease, and that, in general, increasing levels of intellectual property protection will yield increasing levels of innovation. Despite its defense of ever-increasing government-granted monopolies, this ideology cloaks itself in the rhetoric of free markets. The bumbling state, whose interventions in the economy normally spell disaster, turns into a scalpel-wielding genius when its monopolies and subsidies are provided through intellectual property rights rather than regulatory fiat. Above all, this way of seeing the world minimizes the importance of creativity, expression, and distribution that takes place outside its framework and ignores or plays down the importance of the input side of the equation—the need to focus on the material from which culture and science are made, as well as the protected expression and inventions made from that raw material. 62
This process was not—let me stress—was not a simple process of economic determinism or industry conspiracy. Anyone who claims that is the thesis of this book simply has not read it. (Reviewers beware.) Let us start with economic determinism. It was not a situation in which the law mechanistically recorded the interests of the most economically important industries in the area. This was the creation of a worldview, not the steely- eyed calculation of profit and loss. Not only did many of the rules we ended up with make no sense from the point of view of some of the largest economic players in the area—think of the device manufacturers, the search engines, and so on—they frequently made no sense from the perspective of those proposing them. Attempting to twist the law to make it illegal for technology to interfere with your old business method is frequently bad for the industry seeking the protection, as well as for the technology, the market, and the wider society. Since this worldview makes incumbents systematically blind to profit- making opportunities that could be secured by greater openness, rather than greater control, it actually disables them from pursuing some of the most promising methods by which they could have made money for their shareholders. Again, the chapter on the Sony decision offers a salutary example. 63
Economic determinism does not explain the rules we have. Neither are those rules simply a result of the manipulation of elected officials by incumbent industries through crafty campaign contributions and distorted evidence (though to be sure, there was a lot of that as well). Many of the people who put forward this worldview—both lobbyists and lobbied—sincerely believe that more rights will always lead to more innovation, that all property rights are the same, that we do not need to think about both the input and output sides of the equation, that cheaper copying techniques automatically require greater protections, and so on. 64
What of the modest suggestions I put forward here? We could sum them up thus: do not apply identical assumptions to physical and intellectual property. Focus on both the inputs to and the outputs of the creative process; protecting the latter may increase the cost of the former. Look both at the role of the public domain and the commons of cultural and scientific material and at the need to provide incentives for creativity and distribution through exclusive rights. More rights will not automatically produce more innovation. Indeed, we should confine rights as narrowly as possible while still providing the desired result. Look at the empirical evidence before and after increasing the level of protection. Pay attention to the benefits as well as the costs of the new technologies and the flowering of creativity they enable. 65
To me, these points seem bland, boring, obvious—verging on tautology or pablum. To many believers in the worldview I have described, they are either straightforward heresy or a smokescreen for some real, underlying agenda—which is identified as communism, anarchism, or, somewhat confusingly, both. 66
This account smacks of exaggeration, I know. How could things be so one-sided? The best answer I can give came from a question I was asked at a recent conference. The questioner pointed out politely that it was unlikely that the policy-making process would ignore such a fundamental and obvious set of points—points that I myself observed had been well understood for hundreds of years. I had used many examples of intellectual property rights being extended—in length, breadth, scope. Why had I not spoken, he asked, of all the times over the last fifty years when intellectual property rights had been weakened, curtailed, shortened? Since human beings were fallible, surely there were occasions when the length of a copyright or patent term had proved to be too long, or the scope of a right too large, and the rights had been narrowed appropriately by legislation. Why did I not cite any of these? The answer is simple. To the best of my knowledge, there are none. Legislatively, intellectual property rights have moved only in one direction—outward. (Court decisions present a more complex picture, as the previous chapter's discussion of software copyrights and business method patents shows.) 67
What are the odds that the costs of new technologies are always greater than their benefits as far as intellectual property rights holders are concerned? This pattern is not a matter of policies carefully crafted around the evidence. It is the fossil record of fifty years of maximalism. If I lean toward the other side of the story it is not because I am a foe of intellectual property. It is because I believe our policies have become fundamentally unbalanced—unbalanced in ways that actually blind us to what is going on in the world of creativity. 68
We are living through an existence-proof that there are other methods of generating innovation, expression, and creativity than the proprietary, exclusionary model of sole control. True, these methods existed before. Yet they tended to be local or invisible or both. The Internet has shown conclusively and visibly that—at least in certain sectors—we can have a global flowering of creativity, innovation, and information sharing in which intellectual property rights function in a very different way than under the standard model of proprietary control. In some cases, intellectual property rights were simply irrelevant—much of the information sharing and indexing on the Web falls within this category. In some cases they were used to prevent exclusivity. Think of Creative Commons or the General Public License. In some, they were actually impediments. Software patents, for example, have a negative effect on open source software development—one that policy makers are only now slowly beginning to acknowledge. 69
It is important not to overstate how far the sharing economy can get us. It might help to cut the costs of early-stage drug development, as the Tropical Disease Initiative attempts to do for neglected diseases. It will not generate a Phase III drug trial or bring a drug to market. Sharing methods might be used to generate cult movies such as Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, which was created using techniques borrowed from open source software and is available under a Creative Commons license. They will not produce a mammoth blockbuster like Ben Hur, or Waterworld for that matter—results that will generate mixed feelings. So there are real limitations to the processes I describe. 70
But even acknowledging those limitations, it is fair to say that one of the most striking events to occur during our lifetimes is the transformation wrought by the Web, a transformation that is partly driven by the extraordinary explosion of nonproprietary creativity and sharing across digital networks. The cultural expectation that a web of expression and information will just be there—whatever subject we are discussing—is a fundamental one, the one that in some sense separates us from our children. With this as a background it is both bizarre and perverse that we choose to concentrate our policy making only on maintaining the business methods of the last century, only on the story line of the Internet Threat, only on the dangers that the technology poses to creativity (and it does pose some) and never on the benefits. 71
What would it mean to pay attention to the changes I have described? It would mean assessing the impact of rules on both proprietary and nonproprietary production. For example, if the introduction of a broad regime of software patents would render open source software development more difficult (because individual contributors cannot afford to do a patent search on every piece of code they contribute), then this should be reflected as a cost of software patents, to be balanced against whatever benefits the system brought. A method for encouraging innovation might, in fact, inhibit one form of it. 72
Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter. 73
The main thrust of the argument here is still firmly within the Jeffersonian, Scottish Enlightenment tradition. Jefferson does not wish to give the patent to Oliver Evans because he believes the invention will be (and has been) generated anyway without the granting of an intellectual property right and that there are sufficient information retrieval methods to have practical access to it. In this case, the information retrieval method is not Google. It is a polymath genius combing his library in Monticello for references to Persian irrigation methods. The "embarrassment" caused by the unnecessary patent is added expense and bureaucracy in agriculture and impediments to further innovators, not the undermining of open source software. But it is the same principle of cautious minimalism, the same belief that much innovation goes on without proprietary control and that intellectual property rights are the exception, not the rule. When Benjamin Franklin, a man who surely deserved patents under even the most stringent set of tests, chooses to forgo them because he has secured so much benefit from the contributions of others, he expresses Shirky's norm nicely. 74
Indeed, Jefferson's optimism depends partly on a view of information sharing that captures beautifully the attitudes of the generation that built the Web. The letter that I discussed in Chapter 2 was widely cited for precisely this reason. Remember these lines? 75
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. 76
What could encapsulate better the process by which information spreads on a global network? What could more elegantly state the norms of the "information wants to be free" generation? (Though those who quoted him conveniently omitted the portions of his analysis where he concedes that there are cases where intellectual property rights may be necessary and desirable.) 77
In some ways, then, the explosion of nonproprietary and, in many cases, noncommercial creativity and information sharing is simply the vindication of Jefferson's comparison of ideas with "fire . . . expansible over all space." The Web makes the simile a reality and puts an exclamation point at the end of the Jefferson Warning. All the more reason to pay attention to it. But the creative commons I described here goes further. It forces us to reconceptualize a form of life, a method of production, and a means of social organization that we used to relegate to the private world of informal sharing and collaboration. Denied a commons by bad intellectual property rules, we can sometimes build our own—which may in some ways do even more for us than the zone of free trade, free thought, and free action that Jefferson wished to protect. 78
Does all this mean that the Jefferson Warning is no longer necessary? Can we mitigate the negative effects of intellectual property expansion through a series of privately constructed commons? The answers to those questions are, respectively, "no" and "sometimes." Think of the story of retrospectively extended copyright and orphan works. In many cases the problem with our intellectual property rights is that they create barriers to sharing—without producing an incentive in return—in ways that can never be solved through private agreement. Twentieth century culture will largely remain off-limits for digitization, reproduction, adaptation, and translation. No series of private contracts or licenses can fix the problem because the relevant parties are not in the room and might not agree if they were. 79
Even when the parties are available and agree to share, the benefits may not flow to all equally. Beset by a multitude of vague patents of questionable worth and uncertain scope, large information technology firms routinely create patent pools. IBM tosses in thousands of patents, so does Hewlett or Dell. Each agrees not to sue the other. This is great for the established companies; they can proceed without fear of legal action from the landmine patents that litter the technological landscape. As far as the participants are concerned, the patent pool is almost like the public domain—but a privatized public domain, a park that only residents may enter. But what about the start up company that does not have the thousands of patents necessary for entry? They are not in as happy a situation. The patent pool fixes the problem of poor patent quality and unclear scope—one that Jefferson was worrying about 200 years ago. But it fixes it only for the dominant firms, hurting competition in the process. 80
Attempts to form a commons may also backfire. The coordination problems are legion. There are difficulties of compatibility in licenses and the process, no matter how easy, still imposes transaction costs. Nevertheless, with all of these qualifications, the idea of the privately created commons is an important addition to the world view that Jefferson provided, a new tool in our attempt to craft a working system of innovation and culture. No one who looks at the Web can doubt the power of distributed, and frequently uncompensated, creativity in constructing remarkable reference works, operating systems, cultural conversations, even libraries of images and music. Some of that innovation happens largely outside of the world of intellectual property. Some of it happens in privately created areas of sharing that use property rights and open, sometimes even machine-readable, licenses to create a commons on which others can build. The world of creativity and its methods is wider than we had thought. That is one of the vital and exciting lessons the Internet teaches us; unfortunately, the only one our policy makers seem to hear is "cheaper copying means more piracy."
Perhaps some of the arguments in this book have convinced you. Perhaps it is a mistake to think of intellectual property in the same way we think of physical property. Perhaps limitations and exceptions to those rights are as important as the rights themselves. Perhaps the public domain has a vital and tragically neglected role to play in innovation and culture. Perhaps relentlessly expanding property rights will not automatically bring us increased innovation in science and culture. Perhaps the second enclosure movement is more troubling than the first. Perhaps it is unwise to extend copyright again and again, and to do so retrospectively, locking up most of twentieth-century culture in order to protect the tiny fragment of it that is still commercially available. Perhaps technological improvements bring both benefits and costs to existing rights holders—both of which should be considered when setting policy. Perhaps we need a vigorous set of internal limitations and exceptions within copyright, or control over content will inevitably become control over the medium of transmission. Perhaps the Internet should make us think seriously about the power of nonproprietary and distributed production. 2
Saying all this gives us some guidance in how we should think. It points out certain patterns of error. But its prescriptions are not simple. Precisely because it is not a rejection of intellectual property rights, but rather a claim that they only work well through a process of consciously balancing openness and control, public domain and private right, it still leaves open the question of where that point of balance is and how to strike it. 3
In this chapter I want to offer a suggestion that in any other field would be stunningly obvious, boring even, but in the funhouse mirror of intellectual property appears revolutionary. We should make our policy based on empirical evidence of its likely effects and there should be a formal requirement of empirical reconsideration of those policies after they have been implemented to see if they are working. Why is this a good idea? 4
Imagine a process of reviewing prescription drugs that goes like this: representatives from the drug company come to the regulators and argue that their drug works well and should be approved. They have no evidence of this beyond a few anecdotes about people who want to take it and perhaps some very simple models of how the drug might affect the human body. The drug is approved. No trials, no empirical evidence of any kind, no follow-up. Or imagine a process of making environmental regulations in which there were no data, and no attempts to gather data, about the effects of the particular pollutants being studied. Even the harshest critics of regulation would admit we generally do better than this. But this is often the way we make intellectual property policy. 5
So how do we decide the ground rules of the information age? Representatives of interested industries come to regulators and ask for another heaping slice of monopoly rent in the form of an intellectual property right. They have doom-laden predictions, they have anecdotes, carefully selected to pluck the heartstrings of legislators, they have celebrities who testify—often incoherently, but with palpable charisma—and they have very, very simple economic models. The basic economic model here is "If you give me a larger right, I will have a larger incentive to innovate. Thus the bigger the rights, the more innovation we will get. Right?" 6
As I have tried to show here using the words of Jefferson and Macaulay and examples such as term extension, software copyrights, and garage door openers, this logic is fallacious. Even without data, the "more is better" idea is obviously flawed. Copyrighting the alphabet will not produce more books. Patenting E=?mc2 will not yield more scientific innovation. Intellectual property creates barriers to, as well as incentives toward, innovation. Jefferson agonized over the issue of when the benefits exceed the costs of a new right. "I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not." It is not clear that contemporary policy makers approach issues with anything like the same sophistication or humility. But it would be an equal mistake to conclude, as some do, that expansions of intellectual property are never justified. Extensions of rights can help or hurt, but without economic evidence beforehand and review afterward, we will never know. This point should be obvious, banal, even deeply boring, but sadly it is not. 7
From Jefferson and Macaulay and Adam Smith, I derived a second point. In the absence of evidence on either side, the presumption should be against creating a new, legalized monopoly. The burden of proof should lie on those who claim, in any particular case, that the state should step in to stop competition, outlaw copying, proscribe technology, or restrict speech. They have to show us that the existing protection is not enough. But this presumption is a second-best solution and the empirical emptiness of the debates frustrating. 8
This makes an occasion where there is some evidence a time for celebration. What we need is a test case in which one country adopts the proposed new intellectual property right and another similarly situated country does not, and we can assess how they are both doing after a number of years. 9
There is such a case. It is the "database right." 10
OWNING FACTS? 11
Europe adopted a Database Directive in 1996 which gave a high level of copyright protection to databases and conferred a new "sui generis" database right even on unoriginal compilations of facts. In the United States, by contrast, in a 1991 case called Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), the Supreme Court made it clear that unoriginal compilations of facts are not copyrightable. 12
What does all this mean? Take the phone directory—that was the product at issue in the Feist case. A white pages directory is a database of names and numbers, compiled in alphabetical order by name. Does anyone have an intellectual property right over it? Not the particular dog-eared directory lying next to your phone. Does the phone company that compiled it own the facts, the numbers inside that directory? Could they forbid me from copying them, adding others from surrounding areas, and issuing a competing directory that I believed consumers would find more valuable? This was an important issue for Feist because it went to the heart of their business. They issued regional telephone directories, combining records from multiple phone companies. In this case, all the other companies in the region agreed to license their data to Feist. Rural did not, so Feist copied the information, checked as many entries as possible, adding addresses to some of the listings, and published the combined result. Rural sued and lost. The Supreme Court declared that mere alphabetical listings and other unoriginal assemblies of data cannot be copyrighted. 13
It may seem unfair that much of the fruit of the compiler's labor may be used by others without compensation. As Justice Brennan has correctly observed, however, this is not "some unforeseen byproduct of a statutory scheme." It is, rather, "the essence of copyright," and a constitutional requirement. The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This principle, known as the idea/expression or fact/expression dichotomy, applies to all works of authorship. As applied to a factual compilation, assuming the absence of original written expression, only the compiler's selection and arrangement may be protected; the raw facts may be copied at will. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.1 14
Feist was not as revolutionary as some critics claimed it to be. Most of the appeals courts in the United States had long held this to be the case. As the Court pointed out in the passage above, it is a fundamental tenet of the U.S. intellectual property system that neither facts nor ideas can be owned. Feist merely reiterated that point clearly and stressed that it was not just a policy choice, it was a constitutional requirement—a limit imposed by the Constitution's grant of power to Congress to make copyright and patent laws. 15
Daily politics cares little for the limitations imposed by constitutions or for the structural principle the Court describes—that we should leave facts free for others to build upon. Since 1991, a few database companies have lobbied the Congress strenuously and continuously to create a special database right over facts. Interestingly, apart from academics, scientists, and civil libertarians, many database companies, and even those well-known property haters, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose the creation of such a right. They believe that database providers can adequately protect themselves with contracts or technical means such as passwords, can rely on providing tied services, and so on. Moreover, they argue that strong database protection may make it harder to generate databases in the first place; the facts you need may be locked up. We need to focus on the inputs as well as the outputs of the process—a point I have tried to make throughout this book. The pressure to create a new right continues, however, aided by cries that the United States must "harmonize" with Europe, where, you will remember, compilations of facts are strongly protected by intellectual property rights, even if their arrangement is unoriginal. 16
So here we have our natural experiment. One major economy rejects such protection and resists pressure to create a new right. A different major economic region, at a comparable level of development, institutes the right with the explicit claim that it will help to produce new databases and make that segment of the economy more competitive. Presumably government economists in the United States and the European Union have been hard at work ever since, seeing if the right actually worked? Well, not exactly. 17
Despite the fact that the European Commission has a legal obligation to review the Database Directive for its effects on competition, it was more than three years late issuing its report. At first, during the review process, no attention was paid to the actual evidence of whether the Directive helps or hurts the European Union, or whether the database industry in the United States has collapsed or flourished. That is a shame, because the evidence was there and it was fairly shocking. Yet finally, at the end of the process, the Commission did turn to the evidence, as I will recount, and came to a remarkable conclusion—which was promptly stifled for political reasons. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. 18
How do we frame the empirical inquiry? Intellectual property rights allow the creation of state-backed monopolies, and "the general tendency of monopolies," as Macaulay pointed out, is "to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad." Monopolies are an evil, but they must sometimes be accepted when they are necessary to the production of some good, some particular social goal. In this case, the "evil" is obviously going to be an increase in the price of databases and the legal ability to exclude competitors from their use—that, after all, is the point of granting the new right. This right of exclusion may then have dynamic effects, hampering the ability of subsequent innovators to build on what went before. The "good" is that we are supposed to get lots of new databases, databases that we would not have had but for the existence of the database right. 19
If the database right were working, we would expect positive answers to three crucial questions. First, has the European database industry's rate of growth increased since 1996, while the U.S. database industry has languished? (The drop-off in the U.S. database industry ought to be particularly severe after 1991 if the proponents of database protection are correct; they argued the Feist case was a change in current law and a great surprise to the industry.) 20
Second, are the principal beneficiaries of the database right in Europe producing databases they would not have produced otherwise? Obviously, if a society is handing over a database right for a database that would have been created anyway, it is overpaying—needlessly increasing prices for consumers and burdens for competitors. This goes to the design of the right—has it been crafted too broadly, so that it is not being targeted to those areas where it is needed to encourage innovation? 21
Third, and this one is harder to judge, is the new right promoting innovation and competition rather than stifling it? For example, if the existence of the right allowed a one-time surge of newcomers to the market who then use their rights to discourage new entrants, or if we promoted some increase in databases but made scientific aggregation of large amounts of data harder overall, then the database right might actually be stifling the innovation it is designed to foment. 22
Those are the three questions that any review of the Database Directive must answer. But we have preliminary answers to those three questions and they are either strongly negative or extremely doubtful. 23
Are database rights necessary for a thriving database industry? The answer appears to be no. In the United States, the database industry has grown more than twenty-five-fold since 1979 and—contrary to those who paint the Feist case as a revolution—for that entire period, in most of the United States, it was clear that unoriginal databases were not covered by copyright. The figures are even more interesting in the legal database market. The two major proponents of database protection in the United States are Reed Elsevier, the owner of Lexis, and Thomson Publishing, the owner of Westlaw. Fascinatingly, both companies made their key acquisitions in the U.S. legal database market after the Feist decision, at which point no one could have thought unoriginal databases were copyrightable. This seems to be some evidence that they believed they could make money even without a database right. How? In the old-fashioned way: competing on features, accuracy, tied services, making users pay for entry to the database, and so on. 24
If those companies believed there were profits to be made, they were right. Jason Gelman, a former Duke student, pointed out in a recent paper that Thomson's legal regulatory division had a profit margin of over 26 percent for the first quarter of 2004. Reed Elsevier's 2003 profit margin for LexisNexis was 22.8 percent. Both profit margins were significantly higher than the company average and both were earned primarily in the $6 billion U.S. legal database market, a market which is thriving without strong intellectual property protection over databases. (First rule of thumb for regulators: when someone with a profit margin over 20 percent asks you for additional monopoly protection, pause before agreeing.) 25
What about Europe? There is some good news for the proponents of database protection. As Hugenholtz, Maurer, and Onsrud point out in a nice article in Science magazine, there was a sharp, one- time spike in the number of companies entering the European database market immediately following the implementation of the Directive in member states.2 Yet their work, and "Across Two Worlds,"3 a fascinating study by Maurer, suggests that the rate of entry then fell back to levels similar to those before the directive. Maurer's analysis shows that the attrition rate was also very high in some European markets in the period following the passage of the directive—even with the new right, many companies dropped out. 26
At the end of the day, the British database industry—the strongest performer in Europe—added about two hundred databases in the three years immediately after the implementation of the directive. In France, there was little net change in the number of databases and the number of providers fell sharply. In Germany, the industry added nearly three hundred databases immediately following the directive—a remarkable surge—about two hundred of which rapidly disappeared. During the same period, the U.S. industry added about nine hundred databases. Bottom line? Europe's industry did get a one-time boost and some of those firms have stayed in the market; that is a benefit, though a costly one. But database growth rates have gone back to predirective levels, while the anticompetitive costs of database protection are now a permanent fixture of the European landscape. The United States, by contrast, gets a nice steady growth rate in databases without paying the monopoly cost. (Second rule of thumb for regulators: Do no harm! Do not create rights without strong evidence that the incentive effect is worth the anticompetitive cost.) 27
Now the second question. Is the Database Directive encouraging the production of databases we would not have gotten otherwise? Here the evidence is clear and disturbing. Again, Hugenholtz et al. point out that the majority of cases brought under the directive have been about databases that would have been created anyway—telephone numbers, television schedules, concert times. A review of more recent cases reveals the same pattern. These databases are inevitably generated by the operation of the business in question and cannot be independently compiled by a competitor. The database right simply serves to limit competition in the provision of the information. Recently, the European Court of Justice implicitly underscored this point in a series of cases concerning football scores, horse racing results, and so on. Rejecting a protectionist and one-sided opinion from its Advocate General, the court ruled that the mere running of a business which generates data does not count as "substantial investment" sufficient to trigger the database right. It would be nice to think that this is the beginning of some skepticism about the reach of the directive. Yet the court provides little discussion of the economic reasons behind its interpretation; the analysis is merely semantic and definitional, a sharp contrast to its competition decisions. 28
So what kinds of creations are being generated by this bold new right? The answer is somewhere between bathos and pathos. Here are some of the wonderful "databases" that people found it worthwhile litigating over: a Web site consisting of a collection of 259 hyperlinks to "parenting resources," a collection of poems, an assortment of advertisements, headings referring to local news, and charts of popular music. The sad list goes on and on. The European Commission might ask itself whether these are really the kind of "databases" that we need a legal monopoly to encourage and that we want to tie up judicial resources protecting. The point that many more such factual resources can be found online in the United States without any legalized database protection also seems worthy of note. At the very least, the evidence indicates that the right is drawn much too broadly and triggered too easily in ways that produce litigation but little social benefit. 29
Now, in one sense, these lawsuits over trivial collections of hyperlinks and headlines might be seen as irrelevant. They may indicate we are handing out rights unnecessarily—did we really need a legal monopoly, and court involvement, to get someone to compile hyperlinks on a Web page? But it is hard to see social harm. As with the patents over "sealed crustless" peanut butter sandwiches or "methods of swinging on a swing," we may shake our heads at the stupidity of the system, but if the problems consist only of trivial creations, at least we are not likely to grieve because some vital piece of information was locked up. But we should not be so quick to declare such examples irrelevant. They tend to show that the system for drawing the boundaries of the right is broken—and that is of general concern, even if the issue at hand is not. 30
Finally, is the database right encouraging scientific innovation or hurting it? Here the evidence is merely suggestive. Scientists have claimed that the European database right, together with the perverse failure of European governments to take advantage of the limited scientific research exceptions allowed by the directive, have made it much harder to aggregate data, to replicate studies, and to judge published articles. In fact, academic scientific bodies have been among the strongest critics of database protection. But negative evidence, by its nature, is hard to produce; "show me the science that did not get done!" Certainly, both U.S. science and commerce have benefited extraordinarily from the openness of U.S. data policy. I will deal with this issue in the next part of this chapter. 31
If the United States does not give intellectual property protection to raw data, to facts, how is it that the database industry has managed to thrive here and to do better than in Europe, which has extremely strong protection? The economists described in Chapter 1 would surely tell us that this is a potential "public goods" problem. If it is hard to exclude others from the resource—it is cheap and easy to copy—and if the use of the resource is not "rival"—if I don't use up your facts by consulting them—then we ought to see the kind of dystopia economists predict. What would that consist of? First it might result in underproduction. Databases with a social value higher than their cost of creation would not get made because the creator could not get an adequate return on investment. In some cases it might even lead to the reverse—overproduction, where each party creates the database for itself. We get a social overinvestment to produce the resource because there is no legal right to exclude others from it. If you gave the first creator an intellectual property right over the data, they could sell to subsequent users at a price lower than their own cost to create the database. Everyone would win. But the United States did not give the intellectual property right and yet its database industry is flourishing. There are lots of commercial database providers and many different kinds of databases. How can this be? Is the economic model wrong? 32
The answer to that is no, the model is not wrong. It is, however, incomplete and all too often applied in sweeping ways without acknowledging that its basic assumptions may not hold in a particular case. That sounds vague. Let me give a concrete example. Westlaw is one of the two leading legal database providers and, as I mentioned before, one of the key proponents of creating intellectual property rights over unoriginal databases. (There is considerable question whether such a law would be constitutional in the United States, but I will pass over that argument for the moment.) Westlaw's "problem" is that much of the material that it provides to its subscribers is not covered by copyright. Under Section 105 of the U.S. Copyright Act, works of the federal government cannot be copyrighted. They pass immediately into the public domain. Thus all the federal court decisions, from district courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, all the federal statutes, the infinite complexity of the Federal Register, all this is free from copyright. This might seem logical for government-created work, for which the taxpayer has already paid, but as I will explain in the next section of the chapter, not every country adopts such a policy. 33
West, another Thomson subsidiary that owns Westlaw, publishes the standard case reporter series. When lawyers or judges refer to a particular opinion, or quote a passage within an opinion, they will almost always use the page number of the West edition. After all, if no one else can find the cases or statutes or paragraphs of an opinion that you are referring to, legal argument is all but impossible. (This might seem like a great idea to you. I beg to differ.) As electronic versions of legal materials became more prevalent, West began getting more competition. Its competitors did two things that West found unforgivable. First, they frequently copied the text of the cases from West's electronic services, or CD-ROMs, rather than retyping them themselves. Since the cases were works of the federal government, this was perfectly legal provided the competitors did not include West's own material, such as summaries of the cases written by its employees or its key number system for finding related issues. Second, the competitors would include, within their electronic editions, the page numbers to West's editions. Since lawyers need to cite the precise words or arguments they are referring to, providing the raw opinion alone would have been all but useless. Because West's page numbers were one of the standard ways to cite case opinions, competitors would indicate where the page breaks on the printed page would have been, just as West did in its own databases. 34
West's reaction to all of this was exactly like Apple's reaction in the story I told in Chapter 5 about the iPod or like Rural's reaction to the copying of its phone directory. This was theft! They were freeloading on West's hard work! West had mixed its sweat with these cites, and so should be able to exclude other people from them! Since it could not claim copyright over the cases, West claimed copyright over the order in which they were arranged, saying that when its competitors provided its page numbers for citation purposes, they were infringing that copyright. 35
In the end, West lost its legal battles to claim copyright over the arrangement of the collections of cases and the sequence in which they were presented. The Court held that, as with the phone directory, the order in which the cases were arranged lacked the minimum originality required to sustain a copyright claim.4 At this stage, according to the standard public goods story, West's business should have collapsed. Unable to exclude competitors from much of the raw material of its databases, West would be undercut by competitors. More importantly, from the point of view of intellectual property policy, its fate would deter potential investors in other databases—databases that we would lose without even knowing they could have been possible. Except that is not the way it turned out. West has continued to thrive. Indeed, its profits have been quite remarkable. How can this be? 36
The West story shows us three ways in which we can leap too quickly from the abstract claim that some information goods are public goods—nonexcludable and nonrival—to the claim that this particular information good has those attributes. The reality is much more complex. Type www.westlaw.com into your Internet browser. That will take you to the home page of West's excellent legal research service. Now, I have a password to that site. You probably do not. Without a password, you cannot get access to West's site at all. To the average consumer, the password acts as a physical or technical barrier, making the good "excludable"—that is, making it possible to exclude someone from it without invoking intellectual property rights. But what about competitors? They could buy access and use that access to download vast quantities of the material that is unprotected by copyright. Or could they? Again, West can erect a variety of barriers, ranging from technical limits on how much can be downloaded to contractual restrictions on what those who purchase its service can do ("No copying every federal case," for example). 37
Let's say the competitor somehow manages to get around all this. Let's say it somehow avoids copying the material that West does have a copyright over—such as the headnotes and case synopses. The competitor launches their competing site at lower prices amidst much fanfare. Do I immediately and faithlessly desert West for a lower-priced competitor? Not at all. First of all, there are lots of useful things in the West database that are covered by copyright—law review articles and certain treatises, for example. The competitor frequently cannot copy those without coming to the same sort of agreements that West has with the copyright holders. For much legal research, that secondary material is as important as the cases. If West has both, and the competitor only one, I will stick with West. Second, West's service is very well designed. (It is only their copyright policies I dislike, not the product.) If a judge cites a law review article in a case, West will helpfully provide a hyperlink to the precise section of the article she is referring to. I can click on it and in a second see what the substance of the argument is. The reverse is true if a law review article cites a statute or a case. Cases have "flags" on them indicating whether they have been overruled or cited approvingly in subsequent decisions. In other words, faced with the competitive pressure of those who would commoditize their service and provide it at lower cost, West has done what any smart company would: added features and competed by offering a superior service. Often it has done so by "tying" its uncopyrightable data structures to its huge library of copyrighted legal material. 38
The company that challenged Westlaw in court was called Hyperlaw. It won triumphantly. The courts declared that federal cases and the page numbers in the West volumes were in the public domain. That decision came in 1998 and Westlaw has lobbied hard since then to reverse it by statute, to create some version of the Database Directive in the United States. To date, they have failed. The victor, Hyperlaw, has since gone out of business. Westlaw has not. 39
This little story contains a larger truth. It is true that innovation and information goods will, in general, tend to be less excludable and less rival than a ham sandwich, say. But, in practice, some of them will be linked or connected in their social setting to other phenomena that are highly excludable. The software can easily be copied—but access to the help lines can be restricted with ease. Audiences cannot easily be excluded from viewing television broadcasts, but advertisers can easily be excluded from placing their advertisements in those programs. The noncopyrightable court decisions are of most use when embedded within a technical system that gives easy access to other material—some of it copyrighted and all of it protected by technical measures and contractual restrictions. The music file can be downloaded; the band's T-shirt or the experience of the live concert cannot. Does this mean that we never need an intellectual property right? Not at all. But it does indicate that we need to be careful when someone claims that "without a new intellectual property right I am doomed." 40
One final story may drive home the point. When they read Feist v. Rural, law students often assume that the only reason Feist offered to license the white pages listings from Rural is because they (mistakenly) thought they were copyrighted. This is unlikely. Most good copyright lawyers would have told you at the time of the Feist case that the "sweat of the brow" decisions that gave copyright protection based on hard work were not good law. Most courts of appeals had said so. True, there was some legal uncertainty, and that is often worth paying to avoid. But switch the question around and suppose it is the day after the Supreme Court decides the Feist case, and Feist is heading off into another market to try to make a new regional phone directory. Do they now just take the numbers without paying for them, or do they still try to negotiate a license? The latter is overwhelmingly likely. Why? Well, for one thing, they would get a computer-readable version of the names and would not have to retype or optically scan them. More importantly, the contract could include a right to immediate updates and new listings. 41
The day after the Feist decision, the only thing that had changed in the telephone directory market was that telephone companies knew for sure, rather than merely as a probability, that if they refused to license, their competitors could laboriously copy their old listings without penalty. The nuclear option was no longer available. Maybe the price demanded would be a little lower. But there would still be lots of good reasons for Feist to buy the information, even though it was uncopyrighted. You do not always need an intellectual property right to make a deal. Of course, that is not the whole story. Perhaps the incentives provided by other methods are insufficient. But in the U.S. database industry they do not seem to have been. Quite the contrary. The studies we have on the European and the American rules on database rights indicate that the American approach simply works better. 42
I was not always opposed to intellectual property rights over data. Indeed, in a book written before the enactment of the Database Directive, I said that there was a respectable economic argument that such protection might be warranted and that we needed research on the issue.5 Unfortunately, Europe got the right without the research. The facts are now in. If the European Database Directive were a drug, the government would be pulling it from the market until its efficacy and harmfulness could be reassessed. At the very least, the Commission needed a detailed empirical review of the directive's effects, and needs to adjust the directive's definitions and fine-tune its limitations. But there is a second lesson. There is more discussion of the empirical economic effects of the Database Directive in this chapter than in the six-hundred-page review of the directive that the European Commission paid a private company to conduct, and which was the first official document to consider the issue. 43
That seemed to me and to many other academics to be a scandal and we said so as loudly as we could, pointing out the empirical evidence suggesting that the directive was not working. Yet if it was a scandal, it was not a surprising one, because the evidence-free process is altogether typical of the way we make intellectual property policy. President Bush is not the only one to make "faith-based" decisions. 44
There was, however, a ray of hope. In its official report on the competitive effects of the Database Directive, the European Commission recently went beyond reliance on anecdote and industry testimony and did something amazing and admirable. It conducted an empirical evaluation of whether the directive was actually doing any good. 45
The report honestly described the directive as "a Community creation with no precedent in any international convention." Using a methodology similar to the one in this chapter on the subject, the Commission found that "the economic impact of the 'sui generis' right on database production is unproven. Introduced to stimulate the production of databases in Europe, the new instrument has had no proven impact on the production of databases."6 46
In fact, their study showed that the production of databases had fallen to pre-directive levels and that the U.S. database industry, which has no such intellectual property right, was growing faster than the European Union's. The gap appears to be widening. This is consistent with the data I had pointed out in newspaper articles on the subject, but the Commission's study was more recent and, if anything, more damning. 47
Commission insiders hinted that the study may be part of a larger—and welcome—transformation in which a more professional and empirical look is being taken at the competitive effects of intellectual property protection. Could we be moving away from faith-based policy in which the assumption is that the more new rights we create, the better off we will be? Perhaps. But unfortunately, while the report was a dramatic improvement, traces of the Commission's older predilection for faith-based policy and voodoo economics still remain. 48
The Commission coupled its empirical study of whether the directive had actually stimulated the production of new databases with another intriguing kind of empiricism. It sent out a questionnaire to the European database industry asking if they liked their intellectual property right—a procedure with all the rigor of setting farm policy by asking French farmers how they feel about agricultural subsidies. More bizarrely still, the report sometimes juxtaposed the two studies as if they were of equivalent worth. Perhaps this method of decision making could be expanded to other areas. We could set communications policy by conducting psychoanalytic interviews with state telephone companies—let current incumbents' opinions determine what is good for the market as a whole. "What is your emotional relationship with your monopoly?" "I really like it!" "Do you think it hurts competition?" "Not at all!" 49
There are also a few places where the reasoning in the report left one scratching one's head. One goal of the database right was to help close the gap between the size of the European and U.S. database markets. Even before the directive, most European countries already gave greater protection than the United States to compilations of fact. The directive raised the level still higher. The theory was that this would help build European market share. Of course, the opposite is also possible. Setting intellectual property rights too high can actually stunt innovation. In practice, as the Commission's report observes, "the ratio of European / U.S. database production, which was nearly 1:2 in 1996, has become 1:3 in 2004."7 Europe had started with higher protection and a smaller market. Then it raised its level of protection and lost even more ground. Yet the report was oddly diffident about the possibility that the U.S. system actually works better. 50
In its conclusion, the report offered a number of possibilities, including repealing the directive, amending it to limit or remove the "sui generis" right while leaving the rest of the directive in place, and keeping the system as it is. The first options are easy to understand. Who would want to keep a system when it is not increasing database production, or European market share, and, indeed, might be actively harmful? Why leave things as they are? The report offers several reasons. 51
First, database companies want to keep the directive. (The report delicately notes that their "endorsement . . . is somewhat at odds with the continued success of U.S. publishing and database production that thrives without . . . [such] protection," but nevertheless appears to be "a political reality.") Second, repealing the directive would reopen the debate on what level of protection is needed. Third, change may be costly. 52
Imagine applying these arguments to a drug trial. The patients in the control group have done better than those given the drug and there is evidence that the drug might be harmful. But the drug companies like their profits and want to keep the drug on the market. Though "somewhat at odds" with the evidence, this is a "political reality." Getting rid of the drug would reopen the debate on the search for a cure. Change is costly—true. But what is the purpose of a review if the status quo is always to be preferred? 53
The final result? Faced with what Commission staff members tell me was a tidal wave of lobbying from publishers, the Commission quietly decided to leave the directive unchanged, despite the evidence. The result itself is not remarkable. Industry capture of a regulatory apparatus is hardly a surprise. What is remarkable is that this is one of the first times any entity engaged in making intellectual property policy on the international level has even looked seriously at the empirical evidence of that policy's effects. 54
To be sure, figures are thrown around in hearings. The software industry will present studies showing, for example, that it has lost billions of dollars because of illicit copying. It has indeed lost profits relative to what it could get with all the benefits of cheaper copying and transmission worldwide and with perfect copyright enforcement as well. (Though the methodology of some of the studies, which assumes that each copier would have paid full price—is ridiculous.) But this simply begs the question. A new technology is introduced that increases the size of your market and decreases your costs dramatically, but also increases illicit copying. Is this cause for state intervention to increase your level of rights or the funds going toward enforcement of copyright law, as opposed to any other law enforcement priority? The question for empirical analysis, both before and after a policy change, should be "Is this change necessary in order to maintain incentives for production and distribution? Will whatever benefits it brings outweigh the costs of static and dynamic losses—price increases to consumers and impediments to future innovators?" The content companies might still be able to justify the extensions of their rights. But they would be doing so in the context of a rational, evidence-based debate about the real goals of intellectual property, not on the assumption that they have a natural right to collect all the economic surplus gained by a reduction in the costs of reproduction and distribution. 55
DOES PUBLIC INFORMATION WANT TO BE FREE? 56
The United States has much to learn from Europe about information policy. The ineffectively scattered U.S. approach to data privacy, for example, produces random islands of privacy protection in a sea of potential vulnerability. Until recently, your video rental records were better protected than your medical records. Europe, by contrast, has tried to establish a holistic framework, a much more effective approach. But there are places where the lessons should flow the other way. The first one, I have suggested, is database protection. The second is a related but separate issue: the legal treatment of publicly generated data, the huge, and hugely important, flow of information produced by government-funded activities—from ordnance survey maps and weather data to state-produced texts, traffic studies, and scientific information. How is this flow of information distributed? The norm turns out to be very different in the United States and in Europe. 57
In one part of the world, state-produced data flows are frequently viewed as revenue sources. They are often copyrighted or protected by database rights. Many of the departments which produce them attempt to make a profit or at least to recover their entire operating costs through user fees. It is heresy to suggest that the taxpayer has already paid for the production of this data and should not have to do so twice. The other part of the world practices a benign form of information socialism. By law, any text produced by the central government is free from copyright and passes immediately into the public domain. The basic norm is that public data flows should be available at the cost of reproduction alone. 58