CREATe is happy to present the seventh entry in our series of working papers released in 2024: ‘Insights from economics into copyright and competition law’ by CREATe Fellow Ruth Towse, Professor of Economics of Creative Industries, CIPPM, Bournemouth University. The paper was originally written for the participants of the CREATe Spring School on Platforming Creativity, held in Glasgow in April 2024. You can read a report on the Spring School here.
Ruth Towse writes:
Economics has been applied to copyright and competition law for many years, though interest in the subject was muted until the recent development of new technologies. Copyright and competition law are linked in economic thinking by the fact that in the past, copyright was resisted on principle by economists as being anti-competitive. Understanding how copyright works in practice to incentivise creativity via the marketplace has reduced that opposition to a large extent, though competition authorities are still wary of increasing the scope of copyright and there have been anti-monopoly investigations into collecting societies.
My interest in copyright developed in the early 1990s following research for my book Singers in the Marketplace; several of the people I interviewed asked me if I wanted to know about their copyright royalties (about which I had no idea at the time!). The book was the outcome of a project that used economic analysis of labour markets to understand earnings and costs of classical training of singers. That stimulated me to investigate copyright as a source of earnings for all types of creative activity and eventually to specialise in the economics of copyright. I have stuck to the theme of copyright as an economic incentive to creativity and lately have tried to understand the impact of digitisation on those working in the creative industries.
The economics of copyright has always been a story of the interaction of technologies with markets for creative goods and services and those who produce and consume them. Who gains and who loses from those changes and how they can be adapted to the welfare of society will continue to be a fundamental question for economists as well as for legal experts.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
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