How copyright can impede innovation

From The Globe and Mail:

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WKRP and the tragedy of the anti-commons

A change in the songlist that accompanies the first-season DVD of 1970s sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati provides “an illustration of how copyright and patent thickets can impede innovation.”

… “Notice that no one really gains here from the surfeit of copyright, not even the copyright holders. Is Foreigner really better off by excluding listeners from a few well-timed seconds of Hot Blooded? On the contrary, a little youthful nostalgia adds to demand. But the copyright holders, each in their eagerness to profit, raise the transaction costs of producing the whole product so much that it either isn’t produced at all or is produced, as in this case, in a way which greatly reduces consumer value.”

The Mellon Doctrine

Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog fears the U.S. is now committed to ‘expansionary austerity’:

“But never mind the lessons of history, or events unfolding across the Atlantic: Republicans are now fully committed to the doctrine that we must destroy employment in order to save it. And Democrats are offering little pushback. The White House, in particular, has effectively surrendered in the war of ideas … So that’s the state of policy debate in the world’s greatest nation: one party has embraced 80-year-old economic fallacies, while the other has lost the will to fight.”

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