Microsoft Goes Open Access; When Will It Go Open Source?

from the just-a-matter-of-time dept

Even though Microsoft is no longer the dominant player or pacesetter in the computer industry -- those roles are shared by Google and Apple these days -- it still does interesting work through its Microsoft Research arm. Here's some welcome news from the latter: it's moving to open access for its researchers' publications.

In a recent interview with Scientific American, Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Research, discussed three main motivations for basic research at Microsoft. The first relates to an aspiration to advance human knowledge, the second derives from a culture that relies deeply on the ambitions of individual researchers, and the last concerns "promoting open publication of all research results and encouraging deep collaborations with academic researchers." It is in keeping with this third motivation that Microsoft Research recently committed to an Open Access policy for our researchers' publications.

The new open access policy provides some background for the move:

Microsoft Research is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible because we recognize the benefits that accrue to scholarly enterprises from such wide dissemination, including more thorough review, consideration and critique, and general increase in scientific, scholarly and critical knowledge.

Of course, that's hardly an original insight. It's been known for many years that opening up in order to allow others to review, critique and build upon your work is far more efficient for everyone than locking it up and preventing all those things. It's the basis of all science, for example. And closer to home for Microsoft, the benefits of opening up software have been evident for decades -- ever since Richard Stallman launched his GNU's Not Unix project, based on sharing and collaboration.

Given the fact that Microsoft Research evidently gets this, the interesting question is whether the main Microsoft management ever will. After all, the longer it holds out against releasing its main products as open source, the longer it deprives itself of all the advantages that Microsoft Research is now embracing.

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Filed Under: microsoft research, open access, open source, research
Companies: microsoft

Copyright Week: Open Access As The Antidote To Privatizing Knowledge And Learning

from the locking-up-science dept

The very first copyright law in the US was officially called "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning." Indeed, that was the actual stated purpose of copyright law at the time. It wasn't supposed to be a system for protecting the revenue of artistic folks. In fact, it didn't even cover most artistic works at the time. It was limited to "maps, charts and books." Music? Not protected. Paintings? Not protected. Sculpture? Not protected. That's because it wasn't about artwork, but about the spread of knowledge through learning. Yes, the idea was to provide a limited monopoly to incentivize the initial creation, and the exchange was that it would then be given into the public domain soon after, such that everyone could learn from it. Yesterday, we covered the importance of the public domain, and today's topic for Copyright Week goes hand in hand with it: the idea of open access.

Copyright law was supposed to encourage greater access to knowledge to have a better educated populace. But the current setup of the law appears to do the exact opposite of that much of the time. When it comes to newly discovered knowledge, our copyright law (and the way it's used by some giant companies) seems almost entirely focused on making knowledge more expensive and less open thereby massively hindering the ability to share knowledge and better educate the public.

This has been seen most recently in the publishing giant Reed Elsevier's effective war on access to knowledge, using copyright law as a sort of weapon to block researchers from sharing their own research. However, as we've discussed for many years, the whole system is rigged against knowledge access and sharing, and in favor of giant publishers locking up knowledge -- often including research that was funded almost entirely by your tax dollars.

Here's how the privitization of knowledge works, thanks to copyright:

1. Professor wants to do some research, and files for some grants (usually from the government) to pay for that research. If that professor works for a state school, at least part of their salary is already partially paid for by public funds.
2. Government agrees to grant, provides taxpayer money to the researcher to conduct important research.
3. Research is completed, and the professor and some grad students/assistants write up the results in a paper.
4. Because academics are still (stupidly) judged on how often they "publish" in "prestigious" journals, the professor submits the paper to a few well known journals. In some (though not all) fields, the journals make the professor pay a submission fee.
5. The journals send the paper out to two peer reviewers, who do not get paid. They basically provide an editorial function to the publisher for free.
6. The journal "accepts" the paper, and demands that the professor hand over every possible copyright on the work and related research. I even know some academics who had to recreate their own research for later research, because they felt they were barred from using a chart they had created in a previous work without violating the copyright.
7. The publisher then sells the journal to academic libraries at absolutely insane prices. A freedom of information request at one university a few years ago showed that the university paid £688,093 -- or $1.1 million -- over a five year period for just three products from Elsevier, and only one of those products included full access to all of the published papers. The other two were merely for "abstracts and statistics." For just the popular 'Science Direct,' this one university paid between $150,000 to about $200,000 per year, for a subscription to just one journal.
8. Even when, as with the National Institute of Health, there's a requirement for "open access" publishing after one year, many journals will try to charge a very high fee (often thousands of dollars) to pay for "submitting" the paper to an open access repository.

In short, we have taxpayer funded research for which the publisher pays nothing, but gets the entire copyright, and then they sell the journals back to academic institutions for subscriptions often well over $100,000 per year -- and the research is completely locked up. Even more insulting in all of this, copyright was never the reason that the research was done in the first place. Remember, the purpose of original copyright law was to create an incentive for these individuals to do the research and publish the results -- but here, researchers are academics who are getting paid via grants, so the copyright is not the incentive at all.

It can be argued that copyright was at one point part of the incentive for the publishers to set up the peer review process, and then to help publish and distribute the works, but is that a process that is needed any more? It's difficult to see how. The things that publishers do (peer review, distribution) can be done much more effectively and efficiently these days, without the gatekeeper status or the insanely high prices. Oh yeah, and without locking up the knowledge.

Learning and scientific knowledge increases when we share knowledge, data and information widely and freely, allowing others to learn from it, to build on it and to continue to educate others and themselves. Today's copyright law does the opposite in almost every way. That's why radically changing how open access works and when it's expected is so important if we're to bring copyright law back anywhere near its initial intended purpose.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright week, knowledge, open access, privateering, privitizing, research, science
Companies: elsevier, reed elsevier

After Muzzling Scientists, Canadian Government Now Moves On To Book Burnings

from the return-to-the-dark-ages dept

Techdirt has been tracking the sorry saga of Canada's assault on free speech for a while, as it first muzzled scientists and librarians, and then clamped down on the public expressing its views. Now, it seems, the Canadian government of Stephen Harper is attacking knowledge by dismantling key scientific collections, as this post on The Tyee reports:

Scientists say the closure of some of the world's finest fishery, ocean and environmental libraries by the Harper government has been so chaotic that irreplaceable collections of intellectual capital built by Canadian taxpayers for future generations has been lost forever.

There seems to have been no attempt to find other homes for books, maps and unique collections of historical data, or even to offer them for free to the Canadian public that paid for them. Instead, they are simply being destroyed, some in literal book burnings:

Many collections such as the Maurice Lamontagne Institute Library in Mont-Joli, Quebec ended up in dumpsters while others such as Winnipeg's historic Freshwater Institute library were scavenged by citizens, scientists and local environmental consultants. Others were burned or went to landfills, say scientists.

What's strange is that even though the rationale for this mass destruction is apparently in order to reduce costs, opportunities to sell off more valuable items have been ignored. A scientist is quoted as follows:

"Hundreds of bound journals, technical reports and texts still on the shelves, presumably meant for the garbage or shredding. I saw one famous monograph on zooplankton, which would probably fetch a pretty penny at a used science bookstore... anybody could go in and help themselves, with no record kept of who got what."

In the light of these events, another top scientist made the following comment:

Hutchings said none of the closures has anything to do with saving money, due to the small cost of maintaining the collections. He, like many scientists, concludes that Harper's political convictions are driving the unprecedented consolidation.

"It must be about ideology. Nothing else fits," said Hutchings. "What that ideology is, is not clear. Does it reflect that part of the Harper government that doesn't think government should be involved in the very things that affect our lives? Or is it that the role of government is not to collect books or fund science? Or is it the idea that a good government is stripped down government? "

Hutchings saw the library closures fitting a larger pattern of "fear and insecurity" within the Harper government, "about how to deal with science and knowledge."

Or it may just be that the Canadian government doesn't want any inconvenient scientific evidence to get in the way of its dogma-based policymaking.

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Filed Under: book burning, canada, libraries, research, science, stephen harper

Gibberish Research Paper Quotes My Cousin Vinny, Tells The Reader (Repeatedly) The Paper Is A Fraud... Gets Accepted At Academic Conference

from the high-standards dept

Via the always excellent Retraction Watch, we learn of the story of Navin Kabra, an entrepreneur in India who was realizing that the requirement placed on many students in India that they must get two papers "published" at various conferences was really just a huge scam to get students to pay the fees for the submissions and the conferences. In order to expose all of this, he created two gibberish papers, mostly using the infamous SCIgen app which generates gibberish scientific sounding text. Both papers were accepted, and he paid the fees to have one "published." You can read Kabra's astounding account of all of this on his own blog, or read the incredible paper that was both accepted and published by the conference.

Kabra even went to extra lengths to find out the criteria for accepting papers to the conference, wondering if they basically just accepted everything from anyone who paid. Yet, the organizers of the conferences insisted they had high standards. According to Kabra's recorded interview with the organizers:

• The conference received 130 submissions out of which only 60 were selected.
• All the papers were reviewed by panelists from a panel of international experts using a double-blind review methodology.
• Only high quality papers were accepted
• All accepted papers were sent reviews from at least 3 reviewers each and the authors were then asked to update the papers based on the review comments. (No such thing happened with the 2 papers we submitted to the conference.)

Back to the paper, though. In the very second paragraph the paper straight out tells the reader that it's a gibberish paper generated by SCIgen:

As is clear from the title of this paper, this paper deals with the entertainment industry. So, we do provide entertainment in this paper. So, if you are reading this paper for entertainment, we suggest a heuristic that will allow you to read this paper efficiently. You should read any paragraph that starts with the first 4 words in bold and italics – those have been written by the author in painstaking detail. However, if a paragraph does not start with bold and italics, feel free to skip it because it is gibberish auto-generated by the good folks at SCIGen.

Then there's a ton of absolute gibberish, followed by:

But the motivated reader is encouraged to not read too much into the previous paragraph, because it was copy-pasted from a random document on the internet.

Even when the paper actually pretends to discuss the official topic it's so obviously ridiculous. The paper's title is "Use of Cloud-Computing and Social Media to Determine Box Office Performance" and discusses its special "UIB" and "AAF" algorithms, which it later reveals:

The real key to the UIB algorithm is this: UIB stands for "Use IMDB.com via a Browser" and in this method we simply go to IMBD.com, navigate to the page for the movie we're interested in and check whether the box office performance has been listed there. If yes, we report that number. If not, we try again after a few days.

[....] Figure 2, which is supposed to give an overview of the AAF algorithm is simply a random image that we downloaded off of Google's image search using the search string "how to use Facebook". By now you must be clearly wondering what AAF stands for and how does it work. The full form of AAF is ask a friend, and we do that by posting a status update on Facebook. When someone replies with an answer we simply note that down. If more than one person gives an answer, we take an average.

This is not the only time both are defined. It is repeated multiple times, just in case any human readers somehow missed it. There is no way any human read this paper before it was accepted or published. Later on, it admits directly in the paper that the named author is "not really the author of this paper" and names Kabra as the real author. And that's before it fills a section with dialogue from the famous movie, My Cousin Vinnie. They don't hide this either. After discussing his wife's favorite movie, Sholay (an Indian film), he notes that he would include dialogue from that movie, but since it's not in English, the squiggly spell check lines might alert someone to the fact that something was up:

Another problem is that if we indeed insert Sholay dialogues here, they will all show up in red due to the spell check, and we are a little worried that someone might hit pagedown and notice that section. So, instead, we are replacing it with dialogues from our wife's favorite English movie, My Cousin Vinnie.

And, the paper lives up to that promise.

There is, also, the required shout out to Douglas Adams.

Lastly, but not the leastly, my friend Shrikant, who is likely to read this paper will never forgive me if I don't mention in this paper that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.

And, of course, in the "conclusion" of the paper -- just in case someone skipped right to the conclusion, they again make what they're doing quite obvious to the point of directly saying that no one read the paper:

In this position paper we described UIB, a method to use the browser to check IMDB.com to lookup box office performance of movies, and AAF, a method to ask friends on Facebook about how a movie is doing, and a hybrid algorithm AAFtUIB in which we ask a friend to use IMDB.com. And we've managed to reference Hilbert, HHGTTG, Sholay, My Cousin Vinny, Jeff Naughton, the Wisconsin Database Performance Paper, Xeno's paradox, Meeta Kabra and the wogma.com website, and we even referenced the Sokal Affair in the heading of the paper (actually in the name of the institute that the authors are from, but you get what I mean, right?) proving once and for all that nobody has read this paper.

Kabra's writeup notes that this entire experience has been quite depressing.

My original intention of doing this was to spread awareness amongst students about the true nature of such conferences.

But now, after having gone through the experience, I am a bit depressed. I don’t know how awareness about this issue is going to help.

As he points out, since students are still required to have papers accepted by conferences this kind of crap is only going to continue. Of course, at least some of them may now realize that it really doesn't matter what they submit.

Filed Under: research, research paper

Elsevier Ramps Up Its War On Access To Knowledge

from the shameful-behavior-from-a-shameful-company dept

We just recently wrote about the terrible anti-science/anti-knowledge/anti-learning decision by publishing giant Elsevier to demand that Academia.edu take down copies of journal articles that were submitted directly by the authors, as Elsevier wished to lock all that knowledge (much of it taxpayer funded) in its ridiculously expensive journals. Mike Taylor now alerts us that Elsevier is actually going even further in its war on access to knowledge. Some might argue that Elsevier was okay in going after a "central repository" like Academia.edu, but at least it wasn't going directly after academics who were posting pdfs of their own research on their own websites. While some more enlightened publishers explicitly allow this, many (including Elsevier) technically do not allow it, but have always looked the other way when authors post their own papers.

That's now changed. As Taylor highlights, the University of Calgary sent a letter to its staff saying that a company "representing" Elsevier, was demanding that they take down all such articles on the University's network.

The University of Calgary has been contacted by a company representing the publisher, Elsevier Reed, regarding certain Elsevier journal articles posted on our publicly accessible university web pages. We have been provided with examples of these articles and reviewed the situation. Elsevier has put the University of Calgary on notice that these publicly posted Elsevier journal articles are an infringement of Elsevier Reed’s copyright and must be taken down.

Taylor's analysis of this is worth reading. He basically notes that any shred of a chance for Elsevier to fix their reputation is now gone. In the past, he'd suggested ways that the company could better interact with academics and librarians to rebuild its reputation -- but this basically crosses the point of no return.

Because this is, obviously, a very short-term move. Whatever feeble facade Elsevier have till now maintained of being partners in the ongoing process of research is gone forever. They’ve just tossed it away, instead desperately trying to cling onto short-term profit. In going after the University of Calgary (and I imagine other universities as well, unless this is a pilot harassment), Elsevier have declared their position as unrepentant enemies of science.

In essence, this move is an admission of defeat. It’s a classic last-throw-of-the-dice manoeuvre. It signals a recognition from Elsevier that they simply aren’t going to be able to compete with actual publishers in the 21st century. They’re burning the house down on their way out. They’re asset-stripping academia.

Elsevier are finished as a credible publisher. I can’t believe any researcher who knows what they’re doing is going to sign away their rights to Elsevier journals after this.

Of course, there's a legal-geek part of me that hopes that Elsevier takes that last step off the ledge of insanity and actually files a lawsuit against a University (or, even more ridiculous, an academic author), and we get to see the mother of all copyright battles concerning fair use. Remember, in the US, among the key areas where fair use is likely to be found are "teaching, scholarship or research." That's in the statute itself. So, go ahead, Elsevier, bring it on.

The University of Calgary is up in Canada and it has somewhat different rules, including fair dealing, rather than fair use. But the Supreme Court there appears to be quite supportive of fair dealing, especially in academic settings. Other reports note that the company has been similar notices to US-based colleges as well.

Why Elsevier has decided to declare such a war on access is anyone's guess, but it's not going to end well.

Filed Under: access to information, copyright, dmca, education, journals, knowledge, open access, research, takedowns, universities, war on access
Companies: elsevier

Elsevier Continues Its Efforts To Stifle The Sharing Of Knowledge To Pump Up Its Own Profits

from the anti-science dept

In the academic publishing world, I'm not sure if there's any company quite as hated as Elsevier. You may recall the big campaign by academics to boycott Elsevier over its opposition to rules that would make federally funded research publicly available at some time period (six months to a year) after the original publication. Or the time they removed free access to journals in Bangladesh (until academics made enough noise and Elsevier brought them back). Or, how about the fact that Elsevier had an entire division devoted to publishing fake medical journals that were used by big pharmaceutical companies to write ad copy which they could then pretend was from a prestigious medical journal that was really just junk science made to look nice. Oh, and then there was the time Elsevier was caught publishing ghostwritten articles by the pharmaceutical industry that were supposed to be "reviews" of all the research about certain treatments, but which instead played down the negative research and played up the positive kinds.

And then there's just the general concept of the way Elsevier and a number of academic journals work in general. They don't pay their writers, the academics who submit articles (for some journals in some fields, academics actually have to pay significant sums to submit articles), they don't have to pay the peer reviewers who do such reviews for free. So they get content and a certain type of editing entirely for free. Then, they charge obscene sums of money to universities for subscriptions and try to block off all kinds of other access to research if people don't pay up -- which is especially troubling when the research is federally funded. Oh yeah, they also claim the copyright on any research submitted. A professor I know, who was trying to do followup research on some initially published research, actually had to recreate the original results, because the journal that published the original work wouldn't let him reuse the results of his original study, claiming that it was covered by copyright. In other words, they use copyright to make it that much harder to share knowledge and build on the works of others.

The one "crack" in this kind of academic publishing is that many academic journals would "look the other way" if an academic decided to post a pdf of their own research. At least some journals were even willing to put into their contracts that the authors can post a pdf to their own website, or to public collections of journal articles like SSRN.

However, it appears that Elsevier has started cracking down on this practice as well. Bijan Sabet alerts us to the news that Elsevier has suddenly started demanding that copies of research posted to Academia.edu get taken down. Here's one example from bioinformatician Guy Leonard, who posted a copy of his letter from Academia.edu, who clearly isn't happy about this turn of events either: Here's the full text of the letter:

Hi Guy

Unfortunately, we had to remove your paper, Resolving the question of trypanosome monophyly: a comparative genomics approach using whole genome data sets with low taxon sampling, due to a take-down notice from Elsevier.

Academia.edu is committed to enabling the transition to a world where there is open access to academic literature. Elsevier takes a different view, and is currently upping the ante in its opposition to academics sharing their own papers online.

Over the last year, more than 13,000 professors have signed a petition voicing displeasure at Elsevier’s business practices at www.thecostofknowledge.com. If you have any comments or thoughts, we would be glad to hear them.

The Academia.edu Team

Mike Taylor's writeup of this situation (linked above) notes that many academics are pissed off about this and are complaining about it on Twitter. He also notes that there are some good folks at Elsevier who seem to recognize the importance of access to information and who, themselves, are probably pissed off about this. But, really, it seems that it's in Elsevier's general DNA to try to privatize knowledge, research and understanding. What a shameful company.

Filed Under: academic journals, knowledge, research, sharing
Companies: academia.edu, elsevier

Patenting University Research Has Been A Dismal Failure, Enabling Patent Trolling. It's Time To Stop

from the fix-this dept

For many years we've been incredibly critical of the famous Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed in 1980 with the idea that it would encourage greater innovation by pushing universities to patent the research they were doing. The theory -- based on a rather ignorant view of innovation and research -- was that patents would create a market, which, in turn, would enable easier knowledge transfer from academia to industry, leading to a research boom. The actual results have been a near total disaster. What's actually happened are two very bad things. First, it's seriously harmed university research, by guaranteeing much less information sharing between researchers. And, it turns out, that information sharing is a big part of how innovation and big scientific breakthroughs occur. Not surprisingly (if you understand basic economics), when you try to lock up each idea with a patent, researchers (and, more importantly, their administrator bosses), suddenly don't want to share any more. The end result? Lots of important research stifled. What a shame.

The second massive problem in the wake of the Bayh-Dole Act was that every university stupidly thought that it would help make them rich. They bought into the myth of patents and this idea of "tech transfer," and pretty much every research university set up a "tech transfer" office, whose main job was to try to "license" those patents for as much money as possible. University administrators started licking their chops at this potential profit center. But, over the past couple decades, reality has set in. As we've noted for years, ideas are a very, very small piece of the puzzle for innovation. It's the execution that matters. But the folks working in tech transfer offices never understood that and have tried to put ridiculously high prices on their patents, in an attempt to justify their own existence. End result? The exact opposite of the stated goal of the Bayh-Dole Act: less research got transfered into industry, because various tech transfer offices priced it out of the market.

We've pointed out in the past that this expected "profit center" has been a disaster for nearly every university that tried it. With only a handful of exceptions (Stanford, MIT, etc.) tech transfer offices have cost more than they've ever made... while serving to lock up important research, limit collaboration and generally cost the university money that could have gone elsewhere. Oh, and then the trolls came in. We've discussed plenty of times in the past how Intellectual Ventures is the world's largest patent troll, but what few people pay attention to is how it got its patents. That's the nasty secret. The crew at IV saw all the problems with tech transfer offices and saw an opportunity: IV went around from university to university and offered to buy patents in bulk. Desperate tech transfer offices, needing to show some revenue coming in gobbled up the offers, and voila, a giant massive patent troll with tens of thousands of patents was born -- often based on research that was funded by taxpayer dollars.

This appears to be a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to billionaire Nathan Myhrvold, thanks to a bad law that has harmed research, damaged the advance of science and knowledge, harmed university finances and decreased actual innovation. Remember, IV has never produced a single product and brought it to market.

And, tragically, almost no one is talking about all of this, even with patent reform being considered. Hopefully that will start to change. A new report from the Brookings Institution doesn't go into all of this background, but does highlight what a complete and utter failure university tech transfer offices have been.

Using tech transfer office expenses information, Valdivia estimates that 130 universities did not generate enough licensing income in 2012 to cover the wages of their technology transfer staff and the legal costs for the patents they file. What is more, with 84% universities operating technology transfer in the red, 2012 was a good year because over the last 20 years, on average, 87% did not break even.

In fact, the report notes that just 8 universities made up 50% of the licensing revenue. Basically, you've got a huge number of universities that are a giant cost center whose only job is to hold up innovation.

The report has some suggestions as to how this should change, noting that universities, rather than focusing on patents, should instead focus on helping spin out actual startups. On top of that, Congress should change the law to allow for, at the very least, an exemption for non-profit research or experimentation. Those aren't bad recommendations, but it seems like Congress could and should go much, much further.

Either way, it should be recognized what a complete disaster Bayh-Dole has been for basic research, and how it, indirectly, helped create a massive patent troll. Hopefully Congress will finally wake up to its mistake and fix this.

Filed Under: bayh-dole, licensing, patent trolls, patents, research, tech transfer, universities
Companies: intellectual ventures

India Wants Students And Researchers To Have The Right To Photocopy Books

from the medicines-for-the-mind dept

Techdirt has run several stories about the difficulties students in emerging economies have when it comes to buying expensive study materials. Back in 2012, Costa Rican students took to the streets to defend their right to photocopy otherwise unaffordable university textbooks. Earlier this year, Indian textbook authors asked for a lawsuit brought by Western publishers against Delhi University and a nearby photocopying shop over alleged infringements to be dropped. A common element to those two stories is that students often resort to making photocopies of books, since they can't afford the originals. According to this story from Calcutta's The Telegraph, it seems that the Indian government wants to turn the practice into a recognized right:

India will seek changes to international copyright regulations so that students and researchers can procure photocopies of expensive books without having to pay royalties, a senior government source said.

Come December, he said, the Union human resource development ministry will ask the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) to relax its norms that protect authors' and publishers' commercial rights over their books.

The ministry will suggest at the next general assembly of Wipo, a UN body with 185 nations as members, that educational and research institutions be exempted from the copyright regime.

That's a pretty bold move, and it will be interesting to see the details. But it is certainly in keeping with India's successful attempts to make vital medicines available to its people at prices they can afford, despite what the patent-holders might want. In some ways, this new plan is an extension of that idea, since it recognizes that some things -- like medicine or knowledge -- are simply too important for developing countries to be kept locked up by Western monopolists.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: copyright, education, india, photocopies, research, textbooks

More And More Research Showing That The Assumptions Underpinning Copyright Law Are Fundamentally Wrong

from the empirical-research dept

For years, we've been arguing against faith-based policy making when it comes to intellectual property. This is the belief that "if some intellectual property is good, more must be better," when it's never been established that the fundamental principle is true in the first place. Thankfully, there's been a renewed focus on empirical studies looking at the impact of intellectual property law, and nearly all of them seem to suggest the very fundamental assumptions that underpin copyright law aren't actually true. That link is from the Columbia Journalism Review (which discloses that the MPAA funds their coverage of IP issues, though I imagine the MPAA is less than pleased with this article), noting a renewed interest in empirical studies on the impact of copyright law and the fact that many of those studies show that the traditional claims about copyright law don't actually appear to be true.

The takeaway, for Buccafusco and Sprigman, is that markets for creative work are not nearly as efficient as IP law assumes—and that the argument that more protection is needed to ensure innovation might not be quite right. “The work I do with Chris suggests that we don’t know as much about IP as we think we do,” says Sprigman. “It’s been a faith-based policy for a long time. A lot of people in my field are trying to uncover what IP laws actually do and what they don’t.”

Some of the research covered in the article, such as work done by Christopher Buccafusco and Christopher Sprigman, we've covered before. But it also highlights how this is a growing area of research, with a few new academic centers really devoted to the subject. This is a very good thing. For years I've pointed out that the lack of empirical research on the impact of copyright law (and changes to copyright law) was a real disaster for anyone wishing to change copyright policy. Having robust research that proves the actual impact of copyright law should be a good thing. One would imagine that it should be supported across the board, even by legacy entertainment industry players who often are copyright maximalists. After all, if their theories prove wrong and they might be better off with weaker copyright law, wouldn't they want to know that?

Filed Under: copyright, empirical research, research