Copyright and the Profitability of Authorship: Evidence from Payments to Writers in the Romantic Period / Megan MacGarvie, Petra Moser.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

MacGarvie, Megan.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Moser, Petra.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w19521.

NBER working paper series no. w19521

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Copyright and the Profitability of Authorship

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2013.

Summary:

Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of authorship is typically not available to the public. Moreover at current copyright lengths of 70 years after the author's death, further extensions may not have any effects on the profitability of authorship. To investigate effects of copyright at lower pre-existing levels of protection, this chapter introduces a new data set of publishers' payments to authors of British fiction between 1800 and 1830. These data indicate that payments to authors nearly doubled following an increase in the length of copyright in 1814. These findings suggest that - starting from low pre-existing levels of protection - policies that strengthen copyright terms may, in fact, increase the profitability of authorship.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2013.