Does Copyright Affect Reuse? Evidence from Google Books and Wikipedia

Abstract

While digitization has greatly increased the reuse of knowledge, this study shows how these benefits might be mitigated by copyright restrictions. I use the digitization of in-copyright and out-of-copyright issues of Baseball Digest magazine by Google Books to measure the impact of copyright on knowledge reuse in Wikipedia. I exploit a feature of the 1909 Copyright Act whereby material published before 1964 has lapsed into the public domain, allowing for the causal estimation of the impact of copyright across this sharp cutoff. I find that, while digitization encourages knowledge reuse, copyright restrictions reduce citations to copyrighted issues of Baseball Digest by up to 135% and affect readership by reducing traffic to affected pages by 20%. These impacts are highly uneven: copyright hurts the reuse of images rather than text and affects Wikipedia pages for less-popular players greater than more-popular ones. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2767 . This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Motivating the Established, Deterring the NewwThe Divergent Effect of Platform Competition on Member Contributions in Digital Mapping Communities

“…Platform-based markets tend to tip towards one dominant platform (Augereau et al, 2006). Understanding the conditions under which a community-based platform will be dominant is important because they provide open access to the underlying knowledge and stimulate follow-on innovation (Boudreau and Lakhani, 2015;Furman and Stern, 2011;Nagaraj, 2017a;Scotchmer, 1991). Our study shows that commercial platforms negatively affect platforms relying on community-based knowledge production.…”

“…Various disciplines have contributed to this body of knowledge (Raasch et al, 2013), including scholars in economics (Boudreau and Jeppesen, 2015;Zhang and Zhu, 2011), information systems (Bagozzi and Dholakia, 2006;Fershtman and Gandal, 2007;Kane and Ransbotham, 2016;Kraut et al, 2012;Ren et al, 2012;Stewart and Gosain, 2006) and organizational theory (Alexy et al, 2013;Gallus, 2016;Jeppesen and Frederiksen, 2006;Lakhani and Wolf, 2005;Shah, 2006). They draw upon different motivational theories, e.g., of selfdetermination (Ryan and Deci, 2000), social identity (Tajfel et al, 1971), self-concept (Leonard et al, 1999), and norms (Alexy and Leitner, 2011)) to explain why individuals contribute to different forms of communitybased knowledge production (e.g., knowledge platforms (Nagaraj, 2017a;Nov, 2007), ideation initiatives (Bayus, 2013;Dahlander and Piezunka, 2014), free and open-source software (Greenstein and Zhu, 2012;Lerner and Tirole, 2002)). Our focus is on research that examines why people start contributing as well as on research that examines why people continue to contribute.…”

Digital “Mash-ups,” Patents, and Copyright

“…Here, many studies begin with the presumption of weak IP rights, rather than necessarily directly testing the point. For example, a growing stream of work in digitally recorded music tests implications for both product demand (Waldfogel, 2012;Oberholzer et al, 2015;Givon et al, 1995;Reimers, 2016;Nagaraj, 2017) and supply-side provision of products (e.g., Mortimer et al, 2012;Givon et al, 1995;Peitz and Waelbroeck, 2006;Waldfogel and Aguiar, 2018). This work on weak IP rights in recorded music also tends to focus on consumer piracy rather than involuntary spillovers to competitors.…”

“…A handful of other studies more directly examine effects of applying or, alternatively, removing property right protections. For example, Nagaraj (2017) shows that copyright protection of the magazine Baseball Digest (vs. the out-of copyright issues) led to 135 percent fewer images being shared and reused on Wikipedia, and a readership reduction of the copyrighted pages by 20 percent. Heald (2014) finds that copyrighted music is less frequently used in movies than non-copyrighted music.…”

“…Consistent with regular mappings of IP use to industry sectors, much of the pioneering research on digital IP rights tends to study either patents or copyright within specific contexts. For example, copyright has been studied in digital images (Luo and Mortimer, 2017;Nagaraj, 2017), videos (Aguiar and Martens, 2016), music (Oberholzer et al, 2015;Waldfogel, 2012;Danaher and Smith, 2014), digital books and magazines (MacGarvie and Moser, 2014;Reimers, 2016). Patents have been studied in relation to digital algorithms (Hall and MacGarvie, 2010), software (Cockburn and MacGarvie, 2011), and codified genome sequences (Williams, 2013;Sampat and Williams, 2017).…”