copyright

Why copyrights should be shorter

pnrj core principles, public policy , , , , , , ,

Jul 3 JDN 2459783

The copyright protection for Mickey Mouse is set to expire in 2024, though a recently-proposed bill that specifically targets large corporations would cause it to end immediately. Steamboat Willie was released in 1928.

This means that Mickey Mouse has been under copyright protection for 94 years, and is scheduled to last 96. Let me remind you that Walt Disney has been dead since 1966. This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Mickey Mouse should have been released into the public domain decades ago.

Copyright in general has quite a shaky justification, and there are those who argue that it should be eliminated entirely. There’s something profoundly weird—and fundamentally monopolistic—about banning people from copying things.

But clearly we do need some way of ensuring that creators of artistic works can be fairly compensated for their efforts. Copyright is not the only way to do that: A few alternatives that I think are worth considering are expanded crowdfunding (Patreon and Kickstart already support quite a few artists, though most not very much), a large basic income (artists would still create even if they weren’t paid; they really just need money to live on), government grants directly to artists (we have the National Endowment for the Arts, but it doesn’t support very many artists), and some kind of central clearinghouse that surveys consumers about the art they enjoy and then compensates artists according to how much their work is appreciated. But all of these would require substantial changes, and suffer from their own flaws, so for the time being, let’s say we stick with copyright.

Even so, it’s utterly ludicrous that Disney has managed to hold onto the copyright on Mickey Mouse for this long. It makes absolutely no sense from the perspective of supporting artists—indeed, in this case the artist has been dead for over 50 years.

In fact, it wouldn’t even make sense if Walt Disney were still alive. (Not many people live 96 years past their first highly-successful creative work, but it’s at least possible, if you say published as a child and then lived to be a centenarian.) If the goal is to incentivize new creative art, the first few decades—indeed, the first few years—are clearly the most important for doing so.

To show why this is, I need to take a brief detour into finance, and the concept of a net present value.

As the saying goes: Time is money. $1 today is worth more than $1 a year from now. (And if you doubt this, let me remind you of the old joke: “I’ll give you $1 million dollars if you give me $100! Such a deal! Give me the $100 today, and I’ll give you $1 per year for the next million years.”)

The idea of a net present value is to precisely quantify the monetary value of time (or the time value of money), so that we can compare cashflows over time in a directly comparable way.

To compute a net present value, you need a discount rate. At a discount rate of r, an amount of money X that you get 1 year from now is worth X/(1+r). The discount rate should be positive, because money later is worth less than money now; this means that we want X/(1+r) < X, and therefore r > 0.

This is surprisingly hard to get precisely, but relatively easy to ballpark. A good guess is that it’s somewhere close to the prevailing interest rate, or maybe the average return on the stock market. It should definitely be at least the inflation rate. Right now inflation is running a little high (around 8%), so we’d want to use a relatively high discount rate currently, maybe 10% or 12%. But I think in a more typical scenario, something more like 5-6% would be a reasonable guess.

Once you have a discount rate, it’s pretty simple to figure out the net present value: Just add up all the future cashflows, each discounted by that discount rate for the time you have to wait for it.

So for instance if you get $100 per year for the next 5 years, this would be your net present value:

100/(1+r) + 100/(1+r)^2 + 100/(1+r)^3 + 100/(1+r)^4 + 100/(1+r)^5

If you get $50 this year, $60 next year, $70 the year after that, this would be your next present value:

50 + 60/(1+r) + 70/(1+r)^2

If the cashflow is the same X over time for some fixed amount of time T this can be collapsed into a single formula using a geometric series:

X (1 – (1+r)^(-T)) – 1)/r

This is really just a more compact way of adding up, X + X/(1+r) + X/(1+r)^2 + …; here, let’s do that example of $100 per year for 5 years, with r = 10%.

100/1.1 + 100/1.1^2 + 100/1.1^3 + 100/1.1^4 + 100/1.1^5 = $379

100 (1 – 1.1^(-5))/0.1 = $379

See, we get the same answer either way. Notice that this is less than $100 * 5 = $500, which is what we’d get if we had assumed that $1 a year from now is worth the same as $1 today. But it’s not too much less, because it’s only 5 years.

This formula allows us to consider what happens when the time interval becomes extremely long—even infinite. It gives us the power to ask the question, “What is the value of this perpetual cashflow?”

This feels a bit weird for individuals, since of course we die. We can have heirs, but rare indeed is the thousand-year dynasty. (The Imperial House of Japan does appear to have an unbroken hereditary line for the last 2000 years, but they’re basically alone in that.) But governments and corporations don’t have a lifespan, so it makes more sense for them. The US government was here 200 years ago, and may still be here 200 years from now. Oxford was here 900 years ago, and I see no particular reason to think it won’t still be here 900 years from now.

Since r > 0, (1+r)^(-T) gets smaller as T increases. As T approaches infinity, (1+r)^(-T) approaches zero. So for a perpetual cashflow, we can just make this term zero.

Thus, we can actually assess the value of $1 per year for the next million years! It is this:

1 (1-(1+r)^(10^6))/r

which is basically the same as this:

1/r

So if your discount rate is 10%, then $1 per year for 1 million years is worth about as much to you as $1/0.1 = $10 today. If your discount rate is 5%, it would be worth about $1/0.05 = $20 today. And suddenly it makes sense that you’re not willing to pay $100 for this deal.

What if the cashflow is changing? Then this formula won’t work. But if it’s simply a constant rate of growth, we can adjust for that. If the growth rate of the cashflow is g, so that you get X, then X (1+g), then x (1+g)^2, and so on, the formula becomes just a bit more complicated:

X (1-(1+r-g)^(-T))/(r-g)

So for instance if your cashflow grows at 6% per year and your discount rate is 10%, then it’s basically the same as if it didn’t grow at all but your discount rate is 4%. [This is actually an approximation, but it’s a pretty good one.] Let’s call this the effective discount rate.

For a perpetual cashflow, as long as r > g, this becomes:

X/(r-g)

With this in mind, let’s return to the question of copyright. How long should copyright protection last?

We want it to last long enough for artists to be fairly compensated for their work; but what does “fairly compensated” mean? Well, with the concept of a perpetual net present value in mind, we could quantify this as the majority of all revenue that would be expected to be earned by a perpetual copyright.

I think this is actually quite generous: We’re saying that you should get to keep the copyright long enough to get most of what you’d probably get if we allowed you to own it forever. In some cases this might actually result in a copyright that’s too long; but I don’t see how it could result in it being too short.

Mickey Mouse today earns about $3 million per year. That’s honestly amazing, to continue to rake in that much money after such a long period. But, adjusted for inflation, that’s actually quite a bit less than what he took in just a few years after his first films were released, nominally $1 million per year which comes to more like $19 million per year in today’s money.

This means that our discount rate is larger than our growth rate (r > g) even if r is just inflation; but in fact we should use a discount rate higher than inflation. Let’s use a plausible but slightly conservative discount rate of 5%.

To grow from nominally $1 million to nominally $3 million per year in 94 years means a growth rate of about 1% per year.

So, our effective discount rate is 4%.

Then, a perpetual copyright for Mickey Mouse should be worth approximately:

X/(r-g) = 10^6/(0.04) = $25 million

Yes, that’s right; an unending stream of over $1 million per year ends up being worth about the same as a single payment of $25 million way back in 1928.

But isn’t Mickey Mouse a “fictional billionare”, meaning his total income over his existence has been more than $1 billion? Sure. And indeed, at a discount rate of 5%, $1 billion today is worth about $10 million in 1928. So Mickey is indeed well above that. Even if I use Forbes’ higher estimate that Mickey Mouse has taken in $5.8 billion, that would still only be a net present value of $59 million in 1928.

Remember, time is money. When it takes this long to get a cashflow, it ends up worth substantially less.

So, if we were aiming to let Mickey earn half of his perpetual earnings in net present value, when should we have ended his copyright? By my estimate, when the net present value of earnings exceeded $12.5 million. If we use Forbes’s more generous estimate, when it exceeded $30 million.

So now let’s go back to the formula for a finite time horizon, and try to solve it for T, the time horizon. We want the net present value of the finite horizon to be half that of the infinite horizon:

X (1-(1+r-g)^(-T))/(r-g) = (X/2)/(r-g)

(1+r-g)^(-T) = 1/2

To solve this for T, I’ll need to use a logarithm, the inverse of an exponent.

T = ln(2)/ln(1+r – g)

This is a doubling time, very analogous to a half-life in physics. Since logarithms are very difficult to do by hand, if you don’t have a scientific calculator handy, you can also approximate it by dividing the percentage into 69:

T = 69/(r-g)%

This is because ln(2) = 0.69…, and when r-g is a small percentage, ln(1+r-g) is about the same as r-g.

For an effective discount rate of 4%, this becomes:

T = ln(2)/ln(1.04) = 69/4 = 17

That is, only seventeen years. Even for a hugely successful long-running property like Mickey Mouse (in fact, is there really anything on a par with Mickey Mouse?), the majority of the net present value was earned in less than 20 years.

Indeed, it seems especially sensible in this case, because back then, Walt Disney was still alive! He could actually enjoy the fruits of his labors for that period. Now it’s all going to some faceless shareholders of a massive megacorporation, only a few of which are even Walt Disney’s heirs. Only about 3% of Disney shares are owned by anyone actually in the Disney family.

This gives us an answer to the question, “How long should copyrights last?”: About 20 years.

If we’d used a higher discount rate, it would be even shorter: at 10%, you get only 10 years.

And a lower discount rate simply isn’t plausible; inflation and stock market growth are both too fast for net present value to be discounted much less than 4% or 5%. Maybe you could go as low as 3%, which would be 23 years.

Does this accomplish the goal of copyrights—which, remember, was to fairly compensate artists and incentivize the creation of artistic works? I’d say so. They get half of what they would have gotten if we never released their work into the public domain, and I don’t think I’ve ever met an artist who could honestly say that they’d create something if they could hold onto the rights for 96 years, but not if they could for only 20 years. (Maybe they exist, but if so, they are rare.) Most artists really just want to be credited—not paid, credited—for their work and to make a decent living. 20 years is enough for that.

This means that our current copyright system keeps works out of public domain nearly five times as long as there is any real economic justification for.

Intellectual Property, revisited

pnrj core principles, development economics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 12, JDN 2457825

A few weeks ago I wrote a post laying out the burden of proof for intellectual property, but didn’t have time to get into the empirical question of whether our existing intellectual property system can meet this burden of proof.

First of all, I want to make a very sharp distinction between three types of regulations that are all called “intellectual property”.

First there are trademarks, which I have absolutely no quarrel with. Avoiding fraud and ensuring transparency are fundamental functions without which markets would unravel, and without trademarks these things would be much harder to accomplish. Trademarks allow a company to establish a brand identity that others cannot usurp; they ensure that when you buy Coca-Cola (R) it is really in fact the beverage you expect and not some counterfeit knockoff. (And if counterfeit Coke sounds silly, note that counterfeit honey and maple syrup are actually a major problem.) Yes, there should be limits on how much you can trademark—no one wants to live in a world where you feel Love ™ and open Screen Doors ™—but in fact our courts are already fairly good about only allowing corporations to trademark newly-coined words and proper names for their products.

Next there are copyrights, which I believe are currently too strong and often abused, but I do think should exist in some form (or perhaps copylefts instead). Authors should have at least certain basic rights over how their work can be used and published. If nothing else, proper attribution should always be required, as without that plagiarism becomes intolerably easy. And steps should be taken to ensure that if any people profit from its sale, the author is among them. I publish this blog under a by-sa copyleft, which essentially means that you can share it with whomever you like and even adapt its content into your own work, so long as you properly attribute it to me and you do not attempt to claim ownership over it. For scientific content, I think only a copyleft of this sort makes sense—the era of for-profit journals with paywalls must end, as it is holding back our civilization. But for artistic content (and I mean art in the broadest sense, including books, music, movies, plays, and video games), stronger regulations might well make sense. The question is whether our current system is actually too strong, or is protecting the wrong people—often it seems to protect the corporations that sell the content rather than the artists who created it.

Finally there are patents. Unlike copyright which applies to a specific work of art, patent is meant to apply to the underlying concept of a technology. Copyright (or rather the by-sa copyleft) protects the text of this article; you can’t post it on your own blog and claim you wrote it. But if I were to patent it somehow (generally, verbal arguments cannot be patented, fortunately), you wouldn’t even be able to paraphrase it. The trademark on a Samsung ™ TV just means that if I make a TV I can’t say I am Samsung, because I’m not. You wouldn’t copyright a TV, but the analogous process would be if I were to copy every single detail of the television and try to sell that precise duplicate. But the patents on that TV mean that if I take it apart, study each component, find a way to build them all from my own raw materials, even make them better, and build a new TV out of them that looks different and performs better—I would still be infringing on intellectual property. Patents grant an extremely strong notion of property rights, one which actually undermines a lot of other, more basic concepts of property. It’s my TV, why can’t I take it apart and copy the components? Well, as long as the patent holds, it’s not entirely my TV. Property rights this strong—that allow a corporation to have its cake of selling the TV but eat it too by owning the rights to all its components—require a much stronger justification.

Trademark protects a name, which is unproblematic. Copyright protects a work, which carries risks but is still probably necessary in many cases. But patent protects an idea—and we should ask ourselves whether that is really something it makes sense to do.

In previous posts I’ve laid out some of the basic philosophical arguments for why patents do not seem to support innovation and may actually undermine it. But in this post I want to do something more direct and quantitative: Empirically, what is the actual effect of copyrights and patents on innovation? Can we find a way to quantify the costs and benefits to our society of different modes of intellectual property?

Economists quantify things all the time, so I briefly combed the literature to see what sort of empirical studies had been done on the economic impact of copyrights and patents.

Patents definitely create barriers to scientific collaboration: Scientific articles with ideas that don’t get patented are about 10-20% more likely to be cited than scientific articles with ideas that are patented. (I would have expected a larger effect, but that’s still not trivial.)

A 1995 study found that creased patent protections do seem to be positively associated with more trade.

A 2009 study of Great Britain published in AER found it “puzzling” that stronger patents actually seem to reduce the rate of innovation domestically, while having no effect on foreign innovation—yet this is exactly what I would have predicted. Foreign innovations should be largely unaffected by UK patents, but stricter patent laws in the UK make it harder for most actual innovators, only benefiting a handful of corporations that aren’t even particularly innovative.

This 1996 study did find a positive effect of stronger patent laws on economic growth, but it was quite small and only statistically significant when using instrumental variables that they couldn’t be bothered to define except in an appendix. When your result hinges on the use of instrumental variables that you haven’t even clearly defined in the paper, something is very fishy. My guess is that they p-hacked the instruments until they got the result they wanted.

This other 1996 study is a great example of why economists need to listen to psychologists. It found a negative correlation between foreign direct investment and—wait for it—the number of companies that answered “yes” to a survey question, “Does country X have intellectual property protection too weak to allow you to transfer your newest or most effective technology to a wholly-owned subsidiarythere?” Oh, wow, you found a correlation between foreign direct investment and a question directly asking about foreign direct investment.

his 2004 study found a nonlinear relationship whereby increased economic development affects intellectual property rights, rather than the other way around. But I find their theoretical model quite odd, and the scatter plot that lies at the core of their empirical argument reminds me of Rexthor, the Dog-Bearer. “This relationship appears to be non-linear,” they say when pointing at a scatter plot that looks mostly like nothing and maybe like a monotonic increase.

This 1997 study found a positive correlation between intellectual property strength, R&D spending, and economic growth. The effect is weak, but the study looks basically sound. (Though I must say I’d never heard anyone use the words “significant at the 24% level” before. Normally one would say “nonsignificant” for that variable methinks. It’s okay for it not to be significant in some of your regressions, you know.)

This 1992 paper found that intellectual property harms poor countries and may or may not benefit rich countries, but it uses a really weird idiosyncratic theoretical model to get there. Frankly if I see the word “theorem” anywhere in your empirical paper, I get suspicious. No, it is not a theorem that “For economies in steady state the South loses from tighter intellectual property rights.” It may be true, but it does not follow from the fundamental axioms of mathematics.

This law paper is excellent; it focuses on the fact that intellectual property is a unique arrangement and a significant deviation from conventional property rights. It tracks the rise of legal arguments that erroneously equate intellectual property with real property, and makes the vital point that fully internalizing the positive externalities of technology was never the goal, and would in fact be horrible should it come to pass. We would all have to pay most of our income in royalties to the Newton and Faraday estates. So, I highly recommend reading it. But it doesn’t contain any empirical results on the economic effects of intellectual property.

This is the best paper I was able to find showing empirical effects of different intellectual property regimes; I really have no complaints about its econometrics. But it was limited to post-Soviet economies shortly after the fall of the USSR, which were rather unique circumstances. (Indeed, by studying only those countries, you’d probably conclude that free markets are harmful, because the shock of transition was so great.)

This 1999 paper is also quite good; using a natural experiment from a sudden shift in Japanese patent policy, they found almost no difference in actual R&D. The natural experiment design makes this particularly credible, but it’s difficult to generalize since it only covered Japan specifically.

This study focused in particular on copyrights and the film industry, and found a nonlinear effect: While having no copyright protection at all was harmful to the film industry, making the copyright protections too strong had a strangling effect on new filmmakers entering the industry. This would suggest that the optimal amount of copyright is moderate, which sounds reasonable to me.

This 2009 study did a much more detailed comparison of different copyright regimes, and was unable to find a meaningful pattern amidst the noise. Indeed, they found that the only variable that consistently predicted the number of new works of art was population—more people means more art, and nothing else seemed to matter. If this is correct, it’s quite damning to copyright; it would suggest that people make art for reasons fundamentally orthogonal to copyright, and copyright does almost nothing useful. (And I must say, if you talk to most artists, that tends to be their opinion on the matter!)

This 1996 paper found that stronger patents had no benefits for poor countries, but benefited rich countries quite a large amount: Increased patent protection was estimated to add as much as 0.7% annual GDP growth over the whole period. That’s a lot; if this is really true, stronger patents are almost certainly worth it. But then it becomes difficult to explain why more precise studies haven’t found effects anywhere near that large.

This paper was pretty interesting; they found a fat-tailed distribution of patents, where most firms have none, many have one or a few, and a handful of firms have a huge number of patents. This is also consistent with the distribution of firm revenue and profit—and I’d be surprised if I didn’t find a strong correlation between all three. But this really doesn’t tell us whether patents are contributing to innovation.
This paper found that the harmonization of global patents in the Uruguay Round did lead to gains from trade for most countries, but also transferred about $4.5 billion to the US from the rest of the world. Of course, that’s really not that large an amount when we’re talking about global policy over several years.

What does all that mean? I don’t know. It’s a mess. There just don’t seem to be any really compelling empirical studies on the economic impact of copyrights and patents. The preponderance of the evidence, such as it is, would seem to suggest that copyrights provide a benefit as long as they aren’t too strong, while patents provide a benefit but it is quite small and likely offset by the rent-seeking of the corporations that own them. The few studies that found really large effects (like 0.7% annual GDP growth) don’t seem very credible to me; if the effect were really that large, it shouldn’t be so ambiguous. 0.7% per year over 25 years is a GDP 20% larger. Over 50 years, GDP would be 42% larger. We would be able to see that.

Does this ambiguity mean we should do nothing, and wait until the data is better? I don’t think so. Remember, the burden of proof for intellectual property should be high. It’s a fundamentally bizarre notion of property, one which runs against most of our standard concepts of real property; it restricts our rights in very basic ways, making literally the majority of our population into criminals. Such a draconian policy requires a very strong justification, but such a justification does not appear to be forthcoming. If it could be supported, that 0.7% GDP growth might be enough; but it doesn’t seem to be replicable. A free society does not criminalize activities just in case it might be beneficial to do so—it only criminalizes activities that have demonstrable harm. And the harm of copyright and patent infringement simply isn’t demonstrable enough to justify its criminalization.

We don’t have to remove them outright, but we should substantially weaken copyright and patent laws. They should be short-term, they should provide very basic protection, and they should never be owned by corporations, always by individuals (corporations should be able to license them—but not own them). If we then observe a substantial reduction in innovation and economic output, then we can put them back. But I think that what defenders of intellectual property fear most is that if we tried this, it wouldn’t be so bad—and then the “doom and gloom” justification they’ve been relying on all this time would fall apart.

Is intellectual property justified?

pnrj ethics, market failure, public policy , , , , ,

Feb 12, JDN 2457797

I had hoped to make this week’s post more comprehensive, but as I’ve spent the last week suffering from viral bronchitis I think I will keep this one short and revisit the topic in a few weeks.

Intellectual property underlies an increasingly large proportion of the world’s economic activity, more so now than ever before. We don’t just patent machines anymore; we patent drugs, and software programs, and even plants. Compared to that, copyrights on books, music, and movies seem downright pedestrian.

Though surely not the only cause, this is almost certainly contributing to the winner-takes-all effect; if you own the patent to something important, you can appropriate a huge amount of wealth to yourself with very little effort.

Moreover, this is not something that happened automatically as a natural result of market forces or autonomous human behavior. This is a policy, one that requires large investments in surveillance and enforcement to maintain. Intellectual property is probably the single largest market intervention that our government makes, and it is in a very strange direction: With antitrust law, the government seeks to undermine monopolies; but with intellectual property, the government seeks to protect monopolies.

So it’s important to ask: What is the justification for intellectual property? Do we actually have a good reason for doing this?

The basic argument goes something like this:

Many intellectual endeavors, such as research, invention, and the creation of art, require a large up-front investment of resources to complete, but once completed it costs almost nothing to disseminate the results. There is a very large fixed cost that makes it difficult to create these goods at all, but once they exist, the marginal cost of producing more of them is minimal.

If we didn’t have any intellectual property, once someone created an invention or a work of art, someone else could simply copy it and sell it at a much lower price. If enough competition emerged to drive price down to marginal cost, the original creator of the good would not only not profit, but would actually take an enormous loss, as they paid that large fixed cost but none of their competitors did.

Thus, knowing that they will take a loss if they do, individuals will not create inventions or works of art in the first place. Without intellectual property, all research, invention, and art would grind to a halt.

 

That last sentence sounds terrible, right? What would we do without research, invention, or art? But then if you stop and think about it for a minute, it becomes clear that this can’t possibly be the outcome of eliminating intellectual property. Most societies throughout the history of human civilization have not had a system of intellectual property, and yet they have all had art, and most of them have had research and invention as well.

If intellectual property is to be defended, it can’t be because we would have none of these things without it—it must be that we would have less, and so much less that it offsets the obvious harms of concentrating so much wealth and power in a handful of individuals.

I had hoped to get into the empirical results of different intellectual property regimes, but due to my illness I’m going to save that for another day.

Instead I’m just going to try to articulate what the burden of proof here really needs to be.

First of all, showing that we spend a lot of money on patents contributes absolutely nothing useful to defending them. Yes, we all know patents are expensive. The question is whether they are worth it. To show that this is not a strawman, here’s an article by IP Watchdog that takes the fact that “a new study showing that academic patent licensing contributed more than $1 trillion to the U.S. economy over eighteen years” is some kind of knockdown argument in favor of patents. If you actually showed that this economic activity would not exist without patents, then that would be an argument for patents. But all this study actually does is shows that we spend that much on patents, which says nothing about whether this is a good use of resources. It’s like when people try to defend the F-35 boondoggle by saying “it supports thousands of jobs!”; well, yes, but what about the millions of jobs we could be supporting instead if we used that money for something more efficient? (And indeed, the evidence is quite clear that spending on the F-35 destroys more jobs than it creates.) So any serious of estimate of economic benefits of intellectual property must also come with an estimate of the economic cost of intellectual property, or it is just propaganda.
It’s not enough to show some non-negligible (much less “statistically significant”) increase in innovation as a result of intellectual property. The effect size is critical; the increase in innovation needs to be large enough that it justifies having world-spanning monopolies that concentrate the world’s wealth in the hands of a few individuals. Because we already know that intellectual property concentrates wealth; they are monopolies, and monopolies concentrate wealth. It’s not enough to show that there is a benefit; that benefit must be greater than the cost, and there must be no alternative methods that allow us to achieve a greater net benefit.
It’s also important to be clear what we mean by “innovation”; this can be a very difficult thing to measure. But in principle what we really want to know is whether we are supporting important innovation—whether we will get more Mona Lisas and more polio vaccines, not simply whether we will get more Twilight and more Viagra. And one of the key problems with intellectual property as a method of funding innovation is that there is only a vague link between the profits that can be extracted and the benefits of the innovation. (Though to be fair, this is actually a more general problem; it is literally a mathematical theorem that competitive markets only maximize utility if you value rich people more, in inverse proportion to their marginal utility of wealth.)

Innovation is certainly important. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that innovation is the foundation of economic development and civilization itself. Defenders of intellectual property often want you to stop the conversation there: “Innovation is important!” Don’t let them. It’s not enough to say that innovation is important; intellectual property must also be the best way of achieving that innovation.

Is it? Well, in a few weeks I’ll get back to what the data actually says on this. There is some evidence supporting intellectual property—but the case is a lot weaker than you have probably been led to believe.

Why are movies so expensive? Did they used to be? Do they need to be?

pnrj ethics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 10, JDN 2457611

One of the better arguments in favor of copyright involves film production. Films are extraordinarily expensive to produce; without copyright, how would they recover their costs? $100 million is a common budget these days.

It is commonly thought that film budgets used to be much smaller, so I looked at some data from The Numbers on over 5,000 films going back to 1915, and inflation-adjusted the budgets using the CPI. (I learned some interesting LibreOffice Calc functions in the process of merging the data; also LibreOffice crashed a few times trying to make the graphs, so that’s fun. I finally realized it had copied over all the 10,000 hyperlinks from the HTML data set.)

If you just look at the nominal figures, there does seem to be some sort of upward trend:

Movie_Budgets_nominal

But once you do the proper inflation adjustment, this trend basically disappears:

Movie_Budgets_adjusted

In real terms, the grosses of some early movies are quite large. Adjusted to 2015 dollars, Gone with the Wind grossed $6.659 billion—still the highest ever. In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs grossed over $3.043 billion in 2015 dollars. In 1950, Cinderella made it to $2.592 billion in today’s money. (Horrifyingly, The Birth of a Nation grossed $258 million in today’s money.)

Nor is there any evidence that movie production has gotten more expensive. The linear trend is actually negative, though with a very small slope that is not statistically significant. On average, the real budget of a movie falls by $1752 per year.

Movie_Budgets_trend

While the two most expensive movies came out recently (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Avatar), the third most expensive was released in 1963 (Cleopatra). The really hugely expensive movies do seem to cluster relatively recently—but then so do the really cheap films, some of which have budgets under $10,000. It may just be that more movies are produced in general, and overall the cost of producing a film doesn’t seem to have changed in real terms. The best return on investment is My Date with Drew, released in 2005, which had a budget of $1,100 but grossed $181,000, giving it an ROI of 16,358%. The highest real profit was of course Gone with the Wind, which made an astonishing $6.592 billion, though Titanic, Avatar, Aliens and Terminator 2 combined actually beat it with a total profit of $6.651 billion, which may explain why James Cameron can now basically make any movie he wants and already has four sequels lined up for Avatar.

The biggest real loss was 1970’s Waterloo, which made back only $18 million of its $153 million budget, losing $135 million and having an ROI of -87.7%. This was not quite as bad an ROI as 2002’s The Adventures of Pluto Nash, which had an ROI of -92.91%.

But making movies has always been expensive, at least for big blockbusters. (The $8,900 budget of Primer is something I could probably put on credit cards if I had to.) It’s nothing new to spend $100 million in today’s money.

When considering the ethics and economics of copyright, it’s useful to think about what Michele Boldrin calls “pizzaright”: you can’t copy my pizza, or you are guilty of pizzaright infringement. Many of the arguments for copyright are so general—this is a valuable service, it carries some risk of failure, it wouldn’t be as profitable without the monopoly, so fewer companies might enter the business—that they would also apply to pizza. Yet somehow nobody thinks that pizzaright should be a thing. If there is a justification for copyrights, it must come from the special circumstances of works of art (broadly conceived, including writing, film, music, etc.), and the only one that really seems strong enough is the high upfront cost of certain types of art—and indeed, the only ones that really seem to fit that are films and video games.

Painting, writing, and music just aren’t that expensive. People are willing to create these things for very little money, and can do so more or less on their own, especially nowadays. If the prices are reasonable, people will still want to buy from the creators directly—and sure enough, widespread music piracy hasn’t killed music, it has only killed the corporate record industry. But movies and video games really can easily cost $100 million to make, so there’s a serious concern of what might happen if they couldn’t use copyright to recover their costs.

The question for me is, did we really need copyright to fund these budgets?

Let’s take a look at how Star Wars made its money. $6.249 billion came from box office revenue, while $873 million came from VHS and DVD sales; those would probably be substantially reduced if not for copyright. But even before The Force Awakens was released, the Star Wars franchise had already made some $12 billion in toy sales alone. “Merchandizing, merchandizing, where the real money from the movie is made!”

Did they need intellectual property to do that? Well, yes—but all they needed was trademark. Defenders of “intellectual property” like to use that term because it elides fundamental distinctions between the three types: trademark, copyright, and patent.
Trademark is unproblematic. You can’t lie about who you are or where you products came from when you’re selling something. So if you are claiming to sell official Star Wars merchandise, you’d better be selling official Star Wars merchandise, and trademark protects that.

Copyright is problematic, but may be necessary in some cases. Copyright protects the content of the movies from being copied or modified without Lucasfilm’s permission. So now rather than simply protecting against the claim that you represent Lucasfilm, we are protecting against people buying the movie, copying it, and reselling the copies—even though that is a real economic service they are providing, and is in no way fraudulent as long as they are clear about the fact that they made the copies.

Patent is, frankly, ridiculous. The concept of “owning” ideas is absurd. You came up with a good way to do something? Great! Go do it then. But don’t expect other people to pay you simply for the privilege of hearing your good idea. Of course I want to financially support researchers, but there are much, much better ways of doing that, like government grants and universities. Patents only raise revenue for research that sells, first of all—so vaccines and basic research can’t be funded that way, even though they are the most important research by far. Furthermore, there’s nothing to guarantee that the person who actually invented the idea is the one who makes the profit from it—and in our current system where corporations can own patents (and do own almost 90% of patents), it typically isn’t. Even if it were, the whole concept of owning ideas is nonsensical, and it has driven us to the insane extremes of corporations owning patents on human DNA. The best argument I’ve heard for patents is that they are a second-best solution that incentivizes transparency and avoids trade secrets from becoming commonplace; but in that case they should definitely be short, and we should never extend them. Companies should not be able to make basically cosmetic modifications and renew the patent, and expiring patents should be a cause for celebration.

Hollywood actually formed in Los Angeles precisely to escape patents, but of course they love copyright and trademark. So do they like “intellectual property”?

Could blockbuster films be produced profitably using only trademark, in the absence of copyright?

Clearly Star Wars would have still turned a profit. But not every movie can do such merchandizing, and when movies start getting written purely for merchandizing it can be painful to watch.

The real question is whether a film like Gone with the Wind or Avatar could still be made, and make a reasonable profit (if a much smaller one).

Well, there’s always porn. Porn raises over $400 million per year in revenue, despite having essentially unenforceable copyright. They too are outraged over piracy, yet somehow I don’t think porn will ever cease to exist. A top porn star can make over $200,000 per year.Then there are of course independent films that never turn a profit at all, yet people keep making them.

So clearly it is possible to make some films without copyright protection, and something like Gone with the Wind needn’t cost $100 million to make. The only reason it cost as much as it did (about $66 million in today’s money) was that movie stars could command huge winner-takes-all salaries, which would no longer be true if copyright went away. And don’t tell me people wouldn’t be willing to be movie stars for $200,000 a year instead of $1.8 million (what Clark Gable made for Gone with the Wind, adjusted for inflation).

Yet some Hollywood blockbuster budgets are genuinely necessary. The real question is whether we could have Avatar without copyright. Not having films like Avatar is something I would count as a substantial loss to our society; we would lose important pieces of our art and culture.

So, where did all that money go? I don’t have a breakdown for Avatar in particular, but I do have a full budget breakdown for The Village. Of its $71.7 million, $33.5 million was “above the line”, which basically means the winner-takes-all superstar salaries for the director, producer, and cast. That amount could be dramatically reduced with no real cost to society—let’s drop it to say $3 million. Shooting costs were $28.8 million, post-production was $8.4 million, and miscellaneous expenses added about $1 million; all of those would be much harder to reduce (they mainly go to technical staff who make reasonable salaries, not to superstars), so let’s assume the full amount is necessary. That’s about $38 million in real cost to produce. Avatar had a lot more (and better) post-production, so let’s go ahead and multiply the post-production budget by an order of magnitude to $84 million. Our new total budget is $113.8 million.
That sounds like a lot, and it is; but this could be made back without copyright. Avatar sold over 14.5 million DVDs and over 8 million Blu-Rays. Conservatively assuming that the price elasticity of demand is zero (which is ridiculous—assuming the monopoly pricing is optimal it should be -1), if those DVDs were sold for $2 each and the Blu-Rays were sold for $5 each, with 50% of those prices being profit, this would yield a total profit of $14.5 million from DVDs and $20 million from Blu-Rays. That’s already $34.5 million. With realistic assumptions about elasticity of demand, cutting the prices this much (DVDs down from an average of $16, Blu-Rays down from an average of $20) would multiply the number of DVDs sold by at least 5 and the number of Blu-Rays sold by at least 3, which would get us all the way up to $132 million—enough to cover our new budget. (Of course this is much less than they actually made, which is why they set the prices they did—but that doesn’t mean it’s optimal from society’s perspective.)

But okay, suppose I’m wrong about the elasticity, and dropping the price from $16 to $2 for a DVD somehow wouldn’t actually increase the number purchased. What other sources of revenue would they have? Well, box office tickets would still be a thing. They’d have to come down in price, but given the high-quality high-fidelity versions that cinemas require—making them quite hard to pirate—they would still get decent money from each cinema. Let’s say the price drops by 90%—all cinemas are now $1 cinemas!—and the sales again somehow remain exactly the same (rather than dramatically increasing as they actually would). What would Avatar’s worldwide box office gross be then? $278 million. They could give the DVDs away for free and still turn a profit.

And that’s Avatar, one of the most expensive movies ever made. By cutting out the winner-takes-all salaries and huge corporate profits, the budget can be substantially reduced, and then what real costs remain can be quite well covered by box office and DVD sales at reasonable prices. If you imagine that piracy somehow undercuts everything until you have to give away things for free, you might think this is impossible; but in reality pirated versions are of unreliable quality, people do want to support artists and they are willing to pay something for their entertainment. They’re just tired of paying monopoly prices to benefit the shareholders of Viacom.

Would this end the era of the multi-millionaire movie star? Yes, I suppose it might. But it would also put about $10 billion per year back in the pockets of American consumers—and there’s little reason to think it would take away future Avatars, much less future Gone with the Winds.

What does it mean to “own” an idea?

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JDN 2457195 EDT 11:29.

For a long time I’ve been suspicious of intellectual property as current formulated, but I’m never quite sure what to replace it with. I recently finished reading a surprisingly compelling little book called Against Intellectual Monopoly, which offered some more direct empirical support for many of my more philosophical concerns. (Fitting their opposition to copyright law, the authors, Michele Boldrin and David Levine, offer the full text of the book for free online.)

Boldrin and Levine argue that they are not in fact opposed to intellectual property, but intellectual monopoly. I think this is a bit of a silly distinction myself, and in fact muddles the issue a little because most of what we currently call “intellectual property” is in fact what they call “intellectual monopoly”.

The problems with intellectual property are well-documented within, but I think it’s worth repeating at least the basic form of the argument. Intellectual property is supposed to incentivize innovation by rewarding innovators for their investment, and thereby increase the total amount of innovation.

This requires three conditions to hold: First, the intellectual property must actually reward the innovators. Second, innovation must be increased when innovators seek rewards. And third, the costs of implementing the policy must be exceeded by the benefits provided by it.

As it turns out, none of those three conditions to hold. For intellectual property to make sense, they would all need to hold; and in fact none do.

First—and worst—of all, intellectual property does not actually reward innovators. It instead rewards those who manipulate the intellectual property system. Intellectual property is why Thomas Edison was wealthy and Nikola Tesla was poor. Intellectual property is why we keep getting new versions of the same pills for erectile dysfunction instead of an AIDS vaccine. Intellectual property is how we get patent troll corporations, submarine patents, and Samsung owing Apple $1 billion for making its smartphones the wrong shape. Intellectual property is how Worlds.com is proposing to sue an entire genre of video games.

Second, the best innovators are not motivated by individual rewards. This has always been true; the people who really contribute the most to the world in knowledge or creativity are those who do it out of an insatiable curiosity, or a direct desire to improve the world. People who are motivated primarily by profit only innovate as a last resort, instead preferring to manipulate laws, undermine competitors, or simply mass-produce safe, popular products.

I can think of no more vivid an example here than Hollywood. Why is it that every single new movie that comes out is basically a more expensive rehash of the exact same 5 movies that have been coming out for the last 50 years? Because big corporations don’t innovate. It’s too risky to try to make a movie that’s fundamentally new and different, because, odds are, that new movie would fail. It’s much safer to make an endless series of superhero movies and keep coming out with yet another movie about a heroic dog. It’s not even that these movies are bad—they’re often pretty good, and when done well (like Avengers) they can be quite enjoyable. But thousands of original screenplays are submitted to Hollywood every year, and virtually none of them are actually made into films. It’s impossible to know what great works of film we might have seen on the big screen if not for the stranglehold of media companies.

This is not how Hollywood began; it started out wildly innovative and new. But did you ever know why it started in Los Angeles and not somewhere else? It was to evade patent laws. Thomas Edison, the greatest patent troll in history, held a stranglehold on motion picture technology on the East Coast, so filmmakers fled to California to get as far away from there as possible, during a time when Federal enforcement was much more lax. The innovation that created Los Angeles as we know it not only was not incentivized by intellectual property protection—it was only possible in its absence.

And then of course there is the third condition, that the benefits be worth the costs—but it’s trivially obvious that this is not the case, since the benefits are in fact basically zero. We divert billions of dollars from consumers to huge corporations, monopolize the world’s ideas, create a system of surveillance and enforcement that makes basically everyone a criminal (I’ll admit it; I have pirated music, software, and most recently the film My Neighbor Totoro, and I often copy video games I own on CD or DVD to digital images so I don’t need the CD or DVD every time to play—which should be fair use but has been enforced as copyright violation). When everyone is a criminal, enforcement becomes capricious, a means of control that can be used and abused by those in power.

Intellectual property even allows corporations to undermine our more basic sense of property ownership—they can prevent us from making use of our own goods as we choose. They can punish us for modifying the software in our computers, our video game systems—or even our cars. They can install software on our computers that compromises our security in order to protect their copyright. This is a point that Boldrin and Levine repeat several times; in place of what we call “intellectual property” (and they call “intellectual monopoly”), they offer a system which would protect our ordinary property rights, our rights to do what we choose with the goods that we purchase—goods that include books, computers, and DVDs.

That brings me to where I think their argument is weakest—their policy proposal. Basically the policy they propose is that we eliminate all intellectual property rights (except trademarks, which they rightly point out are really more about honesty than they are about property—trademark violation typically amounts to fraudulently claiming that your product was made by someone it wasn’t), and then do nothing else. The only property rights would be ordinary property rights, which would know apply in full to products such as books and DVDs. When you buy a DVD, you would have the right to do whatever you please with it, up to and including copying it a hundred times and selling the copies. You bought the DVD, you bought the blank discs, you bought the burner; so (goes their argument), why shouldn’t you be able to do what you want with them?

For patents, I think their argument is basically correct. I’ve tried to make lists of the greatest innovations in science in technology, and virtually none of them were in any way supported by patents. We needn’t go as far back as fire, writing, and the wheel; think about penicillin, the smallpox vaccine, electricity, digital computing, superconductors, lasers, the Internet. Airplanes might seem like they were invented under patent, but in fact the Wright brothers made a relatively small contribution and most of the really important development in aircraft was done by the military. Important medicines are almost always funded by the NIH, while private pharmaceutical companies give us Viagra at best and Vioxx at worst. Private companies have an incentive to skew their trials in various ways, ranging from simply questionable (p-value hacking) to the outright fraudulent (tampering with data). We know they do, because meta-analyses have found clear biases in the literature. The NIH has much less incentive to bias results in this way, and as a result more of the drugs released will be safe and effective. Boldrin and Levine recommend that all drug trials be funded by the NIH instead of drug companies, and I couldn’t agree more. What basis would drug companies have for complaining? We’re giving them something they previously had to pay for. But of course they will complain, because now their drugs will be subject to unbiased scrutiny. Moreover, it undercuts much of the argument for their patent; without the initial cost of large-scale drug trials, it’s harder to see why they need patents to make a profit.

Major innovations have been the product of individuals working out of curiosity, or random chance, or university laboratories, or government research projects; but they are rarely motivated by patents and they are almost never created by corporations. Corporations do invent incremental advancements, but many of these they keep as trade secrets, or go ahead and share, knowing that reverse-engineering takes time and investment. The great innovations of the computer industry (like high-level programming languages, personal computers, Ethernet, USB ports, and windowed operating systems) were all invented before software could be patented—and since then, what have we really gotten? In fact, it can be reasonably argued that patents reduce innovation; most innovations are built on previous innovations, and patents hinder that process of assimilation and synthesis. Patent pools can mitigate this effect, but only for oligopolistic insiders, which almost by definition are less innovative than disruptive outsiders.

And of course, patents on software and biological systems should be invalidated yesterday. If we must have patents, they should be restricted only to entities that cannot self-replicate, which means no animals, no plants, no DNA, nothing alive, no software, and for good measure, no grey goo nanobots. (It also makes sense at a basic level: How can you stop people from copying it, when it can copy itself?)

It’s when we get to copyright that I’m not so convinced. I certainly agree that the current copyright system suffers from deep problems. When your photos can be taken without your permission and turned into works of art but you can’t make a copy of a video game onto your hard drive to play it more conveniently, clearly something is wrong with our copyright system. I also agree that there is something fundamentally problematic about saying that one “owns” a text in such a way that they can decide what others do with it. When you read my work, copies of the information I convey to you are stored inside your brain; do I now own a piece of your brain? If you print out my blog post on a piece of paper and then photocopy it, how can I own something you made with your paper on your printer?

I release all my blog posts under a “by-sa” copyleft, “attribution-share-alike”, which requires that my work be shared without copyright protection and properly attributed to me. You are however free to sell them, modify them, or use them however you like, given those constraints. I think that something like this may be the best system for protecting authors against plagiarism without unduly restricting the rights of readers to copy, modify, and otherwise use the content they buy. Applied to software, the Free Software Foundation basically agrees.

Boldrin and Levine do not, however; they think that even copyleft is too much, because it imposes restrictions upon buyers. They do agree that plagiarism should be illegal (because it is fraudulent), but they disagree with the “share-alike” part, the requirement that content be licensed according to what the author demands. As far as they are concerned, you bought the book, and you can do whatever you damn well please with it. In practice there probably isn’t a whole lot of difference between these two views, since in the absence of copyright there isn’t nearly as much need for copyleft. I don’t really need to require you to impose a free license if you can’t impose any license at all. (When I say “free” I mean libre, not gratis; free as in speech, not as in beer—Red Hat Linux is free software you pay for, and Zynga games are horrifically predatory proprietary software you get for free.)

One major difference is that under copyleft we could impose requirements to release information under certain circumstances—I have in mind particularly scientific research papers and associated data. To maximize the availability of knowledge and facilitate peer review, it could be a condition of publication for scientific research that the paper and data be made publicly available under a free license—already this is how research done directly for the government works (at least the stuff that isn’t classified). But under a strict system of physical property only this sort of licensing would be a violation of the publishers’ property rights to do as they please with their servers and hard drives.

But there are legitimate concerns to be had even about simply moving to a copyleft system. I am a fiction author, and I submit books for publication. (This is not hypothetical; I actually do this.) Under the current system, I own the copyright to those books, and if the publisher decides to use them (thus far, only JukePop Serials, a small online publisher, has ever done so), they must secure my permission, presumably by means of a royalty contract. They can’t simply take whatever manuscripts they like and publish them. But if I submitted under a copyleft, they absolutely could. As long as my name were on the cover, they wouldn’t have to pay me a dime. (Charles Darwin certainly didn’t get a dime from Ray Comfort’s edition of The Origin of Species—yes, that is a thing.)

Now the question becomes, would they? There might be a competitive equilbrium where publishers are honest and do in fact pay their authors. If they fail to do so, authors are likely to stop submitting to that publisher once it acquires its shady reputation. If we can reach the equilibrium where authors get paid, that’s almost certainly better than today; the only people I can see it hurting are major publishing houses like Pearson PLC and superstar authors like J.K. Rowling; and even then it wouldn’t hurt them all that much. (Rowling might only be a millionaire instead of a billionaire, and Pearson PLC might see its net income drop from over $500 million to say $10 million.) The average author would most likely benefit, because publishers would have more incentive to invest in their midlist when they can’t crank out hundreds of millions of dollars from their superstars. Books would proliferate at bargain prices, and we could all double the size of our libraries. The net effect on the book market would be to reduce the winner-takes-all effect, which can only be a good thing.

But that isn’t the only possibility. The incentive to steal authors’ work when they submit it could instead create an equilibrium where hardly anyone publishes fiction anymore; and that world is surely worse than the one we live in today. We would want to think about how we can ensure that authors are adequately paid for their work in a copyleft system. Maybe some can make their money from speaking tours and book signings, but I’m not confident that enough can.

I do have one idea, similar to what Thomas Pogge came up with in his “public goods system”, though he primarily intended that to apply to medicine. The basic concept is that there would be a fund, either gathered from donations or supported by taxes, that supports artists. (Actually we already have the National Endowment for the Arts, but it isn’t nearly big enough.) This support would be doled out based on some metric of the artists’ popularity or artistic importance. The details of that are quite tricky, but I think one could arrange some sort of voting system where people use range voting to decide how much to give to each author, musician, painter, or filmmaker. Potentially even research funding could be set this way, with people voting to decide how important they think a particular project is—though I fear that people may be too ignorant to accurately gauge the important of certain lines of research, as when Sarah Palin mocked studies of “fruit flies in Paris”, otherwise known as literally the foundation of modern genetics. Maybe we could vote instead on research goals like “eliminate cancer” and “achieve interstellar travel” and then the scientific community could decide how to allocate funds toward those goals? The details are definitely still fuzzy in my mind.

The general principle, however, would be that if we want to support investment in innovation, we do that—instead of devising this bizarre system of monopoly that gives corporations growing power over our lives. Subsidize investment by subsidizing investment. (I feel similarly about capital taxes; we could incentivize investment in this vague roundabout way by doing nothing to redistribute wealth and hoping that all the arbitrage and speculation somehow translates into real investment… or, you know, we could give tax credits to companies that build factories.) As Boldrin and Levine point out, intellectual property laws were not actually created to protect innovation; they were an outgrowth of the general power of kings and nobles to enforce monopolies on various products during the era of mercantilism. They were weakened to be turned into our current system, not strengthened. They are, in fact, fundamentally mercantilist—and nothing could make that clearer than the TRIPS accord, which literally allows millions of people to die from treatable diseases in order to increase the profits of pharmaceutical companies. Far from being this modern invention that brought upon the scientific revolution, intellectual property is an atavistic policy borne from the age of colonial kings. I think it’s time we try something new.
(Oh, and one last thing: “Piracy”? Really? I can’t believe the linguistic coup it was for copyright holders to declare that people who copy music might as well be slavers and murderers—somehow people went along with this ridiculous terminology. No, there is no such thing as “music piracy” or “software piracy”; there is music copyright violation and software copyright violation.)