Copyright's Communications Policy

Abstract

This paper suggest that the main challenges for 21st century copyright are not challenges of authorship policy, but rather new and harder problems for copyright's communications policy. Since its inception copyright has set important baselines upon which publishers and their modern equivalents compete.business. As the pace of technological change accelerates, copyright's role in setting the conditions for competition is quickly becoming more important, even challenging for primacy the significance of copyright's encouragement of authorship.

The study of copyright's communications policy has both a descriptive and a normative payoff. First, it helps us understand both the existing copyright code and the history of 20th century copyright. Second, it helps us ask whether copyright is in line with other important goals of national communications policy.

Keywords: copyright, communications, telecommunications, authorship, compulsory licensing, public choice, vertical foreclosure, new institutional economics, legal history