Same again, please
Five minutes with Richard Watt“Digitalisation has made it practically impossible to distinguish between the expression and the idea for a great many works”.Richard Watt is a newly minted senior lecturer in economic theory at the University of Canterbury. For the 18 years before that he was a lecturer in Economic Theory at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. So we imagine he speaks Spanish by now, and knows all about wonderful Iberian ham and tapas.
He founded the Society for Economic Research on Copyright Issues in 2001, which last met in June in Singapore, and was its president from 2002 to 2004. He edits the society's journal, and has written a book in which, inter alia, he argues that a little bit of piracy is beneficial to not only society but also copyright holders.
He's a member of the WIPO group of experts that is defining a methodology for calculating the contribution of copyright to national economies.
1. Why is copyright such a fertile field for economics as to encourage you to set up a society to study the issues around it?
“Technological advances have meant huge changes in many aspects of economic life of late, but perhaps none quite so drastic as the way in which products that are traditionally protected by copyright are created, distributed, stored and consumed. It is certainly naïve to think that social systems, such as legal protection devices, should not change as well in such an environment, but the fundamental question is exactly how should social systems adapt. That, combined with two other factors - the increasing importance of copyrightable products in national economies, and the fact that up to quite recently copyright had not been seriously studied by economists, and so many issues that were directly akin to traditional economic theory were clearly not understood by the copyright community - were decisive factors in setting up SERCI.”
2. Do you believe copyright to be the best economic mechanism in a “digital 2006" to balance the needs of creative monopoly and commercial exploitation?
“I do think that copyright in some form does still work, but not with the same general parameters as, say, 10 or 15 years ago. Certainly I believe that copyright needs to exist, even if only to establish a property right, if not to provide protection for that right which may now be done more effectively by other means.”
3. What are the strengths, from an economic viewpoint, of the copyright model? The weaknesses?
“The main strength, probably, is that we are used to the copyright model, and it is reasonably well understood. Changing a status quo is always a risky endeavour. It does, however, have many weaknesses in terms of efficient allocation of resources. Economists, overall, are interested in attempting to evaluate the trade-off between the weaknesses and the strengths of copyright, in a constant attempt to address the question of whether the strengths can still justify the weaknesses. It seems that, over time, the strengths are falling and the weaknesses are growing, which is what has prompted the huge movement towards alternative models.”
4. Do you side with copyright holders on subjects such as “overzealous” scholarship and copyright extensions or not, and why?
“I really don't side with anyone, especially in my roles of Executive Secretary of SERCI, and managing editor of our academic journal. I must remain totally impartial, and my only siding is with the basic truths that emerge from economic theory-based arguments. When such controversies as those you mention spring up, it is almost certainly the case that strong rigorous arguments exist that support both sides, and it is a long process to see who the overall balance of theoretical weight ends up favouring. However, I think that right now it is quite fair to say that economists probably favour the traditional model of a more restricted duration of copyright, and the mainstream probably suggests that the recent extensions are not really justified, especially retroactively (ie, applied to works created under previous law). In that sense, there are many classic works that would probably be best in the public domain but that find themselves protected by retroactive copyright extensions, which ultimately generate the type of controversy you indicate.”
5. Do you believe copyleft and the creative commons licence are positive developments, in that they help promote creative work and create other possible income streams, or do they actually reduce income opportunities in the long run?
“That is, unfortunately, a quite impossible question to answer just yet. Time will tell, but indeed I certainly support the emergence of mechanisms that are able to exist alongside the legal set-up, and that offer more options for creators. I do not see the creative commons and copyleft types of movement as necessarily implying a complete substitution of copyright per se - property rights still need to be defined, and exactly what the creator would like to happen to his work needs to be fully established and legal remedies need to be available for cases in which the intentions of the creator are infringed by others, whatever those intentions are. It will certainly be interesting to see over time the make-up of the types of work, and the types of creator, that prefer to stick with traditional copyright protection and which ones go with the new types of mechanism.”
6. Any opinion on whether ideas should be able to be protected more closely - eg Da Vinci Code case?
“Ideas cannot be protected under current copyright provisions (see question 9 below). It is true that courts have often found that what is a re-expression of an existing work does infringe copyright, but that is not really what copyright is about. Overall, I think all that I would favour is a closer and more clear definition of what is and what is not protected.”
7. Your thoughts on copy protection/DRM devices in the protection/dissemination of copyright works?
“Another sticky issue. DRM would seem to be a very legitimate protection device against piracy, just as locking one's house or car is a device for excluding unwanted intruders. However, it can clearly run up against the rights granted under the fair use clauses of copyright. Who should we favour, the rights holders or the fair users? Perhaps DRM devices can be adapted to allow for just the right amount of free access, and thereby satisfy everyone. Another thing to bear in mind with DRM is the fact that they inspire inefficient (ie, totally wasteful) technology races between programmers and hackers. Really, the DRM issue is not too different in nature to the option of taxing blank supports to generate a fund for reimbursing creators. A negative externality on some economic agents is a necessary ingredient to generate positive welfare gains to others, and it is a matter of empirics whether or not the trade-off is justified.”
8. Searchable libraries - positive or negative?
“Positive, at least in my opinion, but this is ultimately a legal question. However, it seems that searchable libraries as a database do not actually compete with the object searched, and should be classified as fair use. As I know it so far, the objection is when a small part of the searched object is reproduced in the search data-base, in order to improve the performance of the search, and the owners of the copyright in the searched objects claim that this is an infringement. I personally think that this is a weak claim.”
9. Should more copyrightable material be patentable?
“This is perhaps the critical question for the near future. Traditionally copyright only protects expression and never ideas expressed (which are the subject matter of patent). However, digitalisation has made it practically impossible to distinguish between the expression and the idea for a great many works. Of course, the most important example is that of software. It has been argued that an entirely new regime is needed, as the use of either existing regime alone leaves parts of the work unprotected, but the use of both together overprotects the work. If we are to retain the traditional IP models, then copyrightable material cannot be patentable ever, and the real question to address is if the copyrightable parts and the patentable parts can be mutually separated and each protected independently. As this is probably not the case for many digital products, either the traditional paradigm needs to be altered, or an entirely new one introduced.”
