A recent paper reports results from the authors' effort to build what now has to be the single largest U.S. Copyright registration data set. In An Empirical Study of 225 Years of Copyright Registrations, Zvi Rosen and Richard Schwinn, report on what they find from observing more than two centuries of registration data. "This empirical analysis highlights two new insights that our analysis provides: The first is that the copyright term is, to a point, highly significant to registrations. In other words, a longer copyright term leads to more copyright registrations being filed. This is suggestive but not conclusive of a connection between a longer term and the creation of new works. Our analysis also shows that the incentive effect of a longer term offers diminishing returns above a certain point, and is no longer significant at a term of about 70 years. Secondly, we observe for the first time that the passage of a complete revision to the Copyright Law in 1909 which made registration (theoretically) optional without losing copyright protection represented a sharp paradigm shift for the relationship of copyright to economic progress.”
Equally interesting however, is the data set itself. As the authors note, “Until now, scholars have been dependent on limited tallies offered by the Annual Reports of the Register of Copyrights, which have provided the basis for all previous studies. In contrast, this study utilizes the more detailed statistics from the Catalog of Copyright Entries (“CCE”), which also have the benefit of corresponding to calendar year instead of the federal government’s fiscal year. This is also the first study ever to provide yearly estimates of copyright registrations per year prior to 1870 in any form – prior to this study the only figure used was 150,000 for the entire 80 year period… By taking account of changes in agency practice at the U.S. Copyright Office and its predecessors, we can harmonize our data over the entire series of 1790 to 2015.”
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