Sometimes I feel that I spend an inor­di­nate amount of time attacking copy­right, as if I wished to elim­i­nate it. I do not. But I do feel the bal­ance is off. But how should we find the proper balance?

If the real pur­pose of copy­right law is to “pro­mote the progress,” then why not make sure it’s doing so? In other words, why not have actual evidence-based copy­right law? There’s a lot of his­tor­ical evi­dence that can be looked at, and dif­ferent ideas around copy­right law can be empir­i­cally tested. If it doesn’t pro­mote the progress, get rid of it. If it does, then shouldn’t that make almost everyone better off?

via Could Evidence-Based Copyright Law Ever Be Put In Place? | Techdirt.

Of course, how to col­lect, mea­sure, and eval­uate this evi­dence is not simple. Law & Economics pro­vides one pow­erful path, and tends to sup­port changing cur­rent copy­right law. Even if evi­dence is con­tro­ver­sial, at least it gives us a shared foun­da­tion to dis­cuss appro­priate copy­right approaches. So why is it so hard to find studies that pro­vide such actual evi­dence, as opposed to sup­po­si­tion and imagination?