Petra Moser and Copyright Empirics

I thought this short Twitter thread was such a helpful, concise summary of some of NYU economist Petra Moser's excellent work—and the incentive/access tradeoff of IP laws—that it was worth memorializing in a blog post. You can read more about Moser's work on her website.

The US canceled German book copyrights during WWII and scientific output rose as a result. https://t.co/f9diKqKAOu pic.twitter.com/B4Fbw4Qeck

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 1, 2017

Napoleon brought copyright to Italy, and opera writing increased. https://t.co/FtnSI4EKk7 Life is complicated; @PMoserEcon does great work.

— Jeremy Sheff (@jnsheff) September 1, 2017

Two opposing forces of copyrights 1) Basic levels of protection encourage creativity (that's Napoleon in Italy)

— Petra Moser (@PMoserEcon) September 2, 2017

2) Copyrights restrict access and increase price https://t.co/nuYfq2LhC1, and...

— Petra Moser (@PMoserEcon) September 2, 2017

...higher prices make it harder to access existing research, esp at poor institutions, and there's less new science (that's WWI books).

— Petra Moser (@PMoserEcon) September 2, 2017