Optimal Copyright Law Length is 14 Years

To get back in the spirit of post­ing, I’d like to note the fol­low­ing story, via Irish law blog cearta​.ie: How long should the copy­right term be?

In Irelend, it’s life + 70 years, as it essen­tially is in the U.S. after var­i­ous changes to fed­eral law, partly as a result of indus­try lob­by­ing and partly as a result of new inter­na­tional treaties like TRIPS:

Works cre­ated in or after 1978 are extended copy­right pro­tec­tion for a term defined in 17 U.S.C. § 302. With the pas­sage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, these works are granted copy­right pro­tec­tion for a term end­ing 70 years after the death of the author. If the work was a work for hire (e.g., those cre­ated by a cor­po­ra­tion) then copy­right per­sists for 120 years after cre­ation or 95 years after pub­li­ca­tion, whichever is shortest.

(From Wikipedia.)

From the Ars Technica arti­cle by Nate Anderson:

It’s easy enough to find out how long copy­rights last, but much harder to decide how long they should last—but that didn’t stop Cambridge University PhD can­di­date Rufus Pollock from using eco­nom­ics for­mu­las to answer the ques­tion. In a newly-​​released paper, Pollock pegs the “opti­mal level for copy­right” at only 14 years.

Pollock’s work is based on the promise that the opti­mal level of copy­right drops as the costs of pro­duc­ing cre­ative work go down. As it has grown sim­pler to print books, record music, and edit films using new dig­i­tal tools, the pro­duc­tion and repro­duc­tion costs for cre­ative work in have dropped sub­stan­tially, but actual copy­right law has only increased.

According to Pollock’s cal­cu­la­tions (and his paper [PDF] is full of cal­cu­la­tions), this is exactly the oppo­site result that one would expect from a ratio­nal copy­right sys­tem. Of course, there’s no guar­an­tee that copy­right law has any­thing to do with ratio­nal­ity; as Pollock puts it, “the level of pro­tec­tion is not usu­ally deter­mined by a benev­o­lent and ratio­nal policy-​​maker but rather by lob­by­ing.” The pre­dictable result has been a steady increase in the period of copy­right pro­tec­tion dur­ing the twen­ti­eth century.