TY  - JOUR
AU  - MacGarvie, Megan
AU  - Moser, Petra
TI  - Copyright and the Profitability of Authorship: Evidence from Payments to Writers in the Romantic Period
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 19521
PY  - 2013
Y2  - October 2013
DO  - 10.3386/w19521
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19521
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19521.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Megan MacGarvie
Boston University
School of Management
595 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 522H
Boston, MA  02215
Tel: 617/353-9490
Fax: 617/353-6667
E-Mail: mmacgarv@bu.edu

Petra Moser
Department of Economics
NYU Stern
44 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10012
E-Mail: pmoser@stern.nyu.edu
M1  - published as Megan MacGarvie, Petra Moser. "Copyright and the Profitability of Authorship: Evidence from Payments to Writers in the Romantic Period," in Avi Goldfarb, Shane M. Greenstein, and Catherine E. Tucker, editors, "Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy" University of Chicago Press (2015)

M3  - presented at "The Economics of Digitization: An Agenda", June 6-7, 2013
AB  - Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of authorship is typically not available to the public. Moreover at current copyright lengths of 70 years after the author's death, further extensions may not have any effects on the profitability of authorship. To investigate effects of copyright at lower pre-existing levels of protection, this chapter introduces a new data set of publishers' payments to authors of British fiction between 1800 and 1830. These data indicate that payments to authors nearly doubled following an increase in the length of copyright in 1814. These findings suggest that - starting from low pre-existing levels of protection - policies that strengthen copyright terms may, in fact, increase the profitability of authorship.
ER  -