ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The emergence of copyright economics as discipline in economic analysis. Controversy and approaches
Author: Palma Martos Luis, Pulido Pavón Noemí
Intellectual property regimes play a key role in regulating knowledge. Copyright seeks to reward and encourage creativity, which is the driving force behind creative or knowledge goods and services. The analysis and implications of this right forms the basis of “copyright economics”. As an economic discipline, copyright economics first emerged in the work of Arnold Plant The Economic Aspects of Copyrights in Books in 1934. However, it was not until the mid 20th that copyright began to gain ground in the analysis of intellectual property (Hurt and Schuman, 1966; Breyer, 1970; Novos and Waldman, 1984; Johnson, 1985; Liebowitz, 1985; Landes and Posner, 1989), with industrial property, and specifically patents, forming the focus of the bulk of the analysis. A feature of copyright economics is the coexistence of various streams of thought which feed a series of controversies that both hinder and at the same time enrich the research agenda. Given such a context, exploring the link between competition policy and copyright is key to analysing copyright economics, and is one approach from which copyright is studied. At the same time, it also sparks one of the most complex controversies to be found in the field. The earliest economic notions concerning copyright date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, and dealt with the concept of legal monopoly and the possibilities which such a form of copyright offer to the owners to raise prices. This paper aims to draw an historical outline about the emergence of copyright economics as a new area of economic analysis through the study of their dilemmas and approaches that shape it scope and by analyzing the nature of market power conferred by copyright, key aspects and frictions underlying controversy between copyright and competition policy.
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