A couple of things are worth noting here. The first is that the Committee is quite prepared to believe that the effects of term extension would not benefit performers or provide incentives for creativity, and even to believe that it would hurt the balance of trade. The second is the curious argument in the last sentence. Other countries have stronger systems of rights and are less successful. We should change our regime to be more like them! Obviously the idea that a country's creative industries might be less successful because their systems of rights were stronger does not occur to the Committee for a moment. Though it proclaims itself to be unaffected by economic thought, it is in fact deeply influenced by the "more rights equals more innovation" ideology of maximalism that I have described in these pages. 90
Nestling between these two apparently contradictory ideas is a serious argument that needs to be confronted. Should we ignore evidence—even conclusive evidence—of negative economic effects, harm to consumers, and consequences for the availability of culture because we are dealing with an issue of moral right, almost natural right? Must we extend the rights of the artists who recorded those songs (or rather the record companies who immediately acquired their copyrights) because they are simply theirs as a matter of natural justice? Do performers have a natural right to recorded songs either because they have labored on them, mixing their sweat with each track, or because something of their personality is forever stamped into the song? Must we grant an additional forty-five years of commercial exclusivity, not because of economic incentive, but because of natural right? 91
Most of us feel the pull of this argument. I certainly do. But as I pointed out in Chapter 2, there are considerable problems with such an idea. First, it runs against the premises of actual copyright systems. In the United States, for example, the Constitution resolutely presents the opposite picture. Exclusive rights are to encourage progress in science and the useful arts. The Supreme Court has elaborated on this point many times, rejecting both labor-based "sweat of the brow" theories of copyright and more expansive visions based on a natural right to the products of one's genius—whether inventions or novels. Britain, too, has a history of looking to copyright as a utilitarian scheme—though with more reference to, and legal protection of, particular "moral rights" than one finds in the United States. But even in the most expansive "moral rights" legal systems, even in the early days of debate about the rights of authors after the French Revolution, it is accepted that there are temporal limits on these rights. If this is true of authors, it is even more true of performers, who are not granted the full suite of author's rights in moral rights jurisdictions, being exiled to a form of protection called "neighboring" rights. 92
In all of these schemes, there are time limits on the length of the rights (and frequently different ones for different creators—authors, inventors, performers, and so on). Once one has accepted that point, the question of how long they should be is, surely, a matter for empirical and utilitarian analysis. One cannot credibly say that natural rights or the deep deontological structure of the universe gives me a right to twenty-eight or fifty-six or seventy years of exclusivity. The argument must turn instead to a question of consequences. Which limit is better? Once one asks that question, the Gowers Review's economic assessment is overwhelming, as the Select Committee itself recognized. In the end, the government agreed—noting that a European Union study had found precisely the same thing. The sound recording right should not be extended, still less extended retrospectively. The evidence-free zone had been penetrated. But not for long. As this book went to press, the European Commission announced its support for an even longer Europe-wide extension of the sound recording right. The contrary arguments and empirical evidence were ignored, minimized, explained away. How can this pattern be broken? 93
In the next and final chapter, I try to answer that question. I offer a partial explanation for the cognitive and organizational blindnesses that have brought us to this point. I argue that we have much to learn from the history, theory, and organizational practices of the environmental movement. The environmental movement taught us to see "the environment" for the first time, to recognize its importance, and to change the way we thought about ecology, property, and economics in consequence. What we need is an environmentalism of mind, of culture, of information. In the words of my colleague David Lange, we need to "recognize the public domain." And to save it.
Chapter 10: An Environmentalism for Information 1
Over the last fifteen years, a group of scholars have finally persuaded economists to believe something noneconomists find obvious: "behavioral economics" shows that people do not act as economic theory predicts. But hold your cheers. This is not a vindication of folk wisdom over the pointy-heads. The deviations from "rational behavior" are not the wonderful cornucopia of human motivations you might imagine. There are patterns. For example, we are systematically likely to overestimate chances of loss and underestimate chances of gain, to rely on simplifying heuristics to frame problems even when those heuristics are contradicted by the facts. 2
Some of the patterns are endearing; the supposedly "irrational" concerns for distributive equality that persist in all but the economically trained and the extreme right, for example. But most of them simply involve the mapping of cognitive bias. We can take advantage of those biases, as those who sell us ludicrously expensive and irrational warranties on consumer goods do. Or we can correct for them, like a pilot who is trained to rely on his instruments rather than his faulty perceptions when flying in heavy cloud. 3
This book has introduced you to the wonders and terrors of intellectual property law—the range wars of the Internet age. There have been discussions of synthetic biology and musical sampling, digital locks and the hackers who break them, Jefferson and Macaulay, and the fight over video recorders. Now it is time to sum up. 4
I would argue that the chapters in this book present evidence of another kind of cognitive bias, one that the behavioral economists have not yet identified. Call it the openness aversion. Cultural agoraphobia. We are systematically likely to undervalue the importance, viability, and productive power of open systems, open networks, and nonproprietary production. 5