Passage Two

The idea that government should regulate intellectual property through copyrights and patents is relatively recent in human history, and the precise details of what intellectual property is protected for how long vary across nations and occasionally change. There are two standard sociological justifications for patents or copyrights: They reward creators for their labor, and they encourage greater creativity. Both of these are empirical claims that can be tested scientifically and could be false in some realms.

Consider music. Star performers existed before the 20th century, such as Franz Liszt and Niccolo Paganini, but mass media produced a celebrity system promoting a few stars whose music was not necessarily the best or most diverse. Copyright provides protection for distribution companies and for a few celebrities, thereby helping to support the industry as currently defined, but it may actually harm the majority of performers. This is comparable to Anatole France’s famous irony, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges." In theory, copyright covers the creations of celebrities and obscurities equally, but only major distribution companies have the resources to defend their property rights in court. In a sense, this is quite fair, because nobody wants to steal unpopular music, but by supporting the property rights of celebrities, copyright strengthens them as a class in contrast to anonymous musicians.

Internet music file sharing has become a significant factor in the social lives of children, who download bootleg music tracks for their own use and to give as gifts to friends. If we are to believe one recent poll done by a marketing firm rather than social scientists, 48 of American Internet users aged 12 to 17 had downloaded music files in the past month. In so doing, they violate copyright laws, and criminologists would hypothesize they thereby learn contempt for laws in general. A poll by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that two-thirds of an estimated 35 million Americans who download music files do not care whether they are copyrighted. Thus, on the level of families, ending copyright could be morally as well as economically advantageous. On a much higher level, however, the culture-exporting nations (notably the United States) could stand to lose, although we cannot really predict the net balance of costs and benefits in the absence of proper research. We do not presently have good cross national data on file sharing or a well-developed theoretical framework to guide research on whether copyright protection supports cultural imperialism versus enhancing the positions of diverse cultures in the global marketplace.

It will not be easy to test such hypotheses, and extensive economic research has not conclusively answered the question of whether the patent system really promotes innovation. We will need many careful, sharp-focus studies of well-formed hypotheses in specific industries and sectors of life. For example, observational and interview research can uncover the factors that really promote cultural innovation among artists of various kinds and determine the actual consequences for children of Internet peer-to-peer file sharing.