Copyright and fair use

A group called the CCIA has an interesting report on the value of fair use and copyright:

Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion, said Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion.

The fair use economy's "value added" is thus almost 70% larger than that of the copyright industries.

The $4.5 trillion in annual revenue attributable to fair use represents a 31% increase since 2002, according to the report, which claims that fair use industries are responsible for 18% of U.S. economic growth and almost 11 million American jobs.

Which, I don't doubt that there is truth to this. I do think fair use, kept reasonable, provides a nice mechanism for balancing intellectual property rights and open exchange.

However, one point seems to have been missed: that fair use can only provide value if the copyrighted works exist in the first place. Fair use is a free rider on copyright.

It would be easy to conclude from the numbers above that we should diminish copyrights and expand fair use to maximize economic benefit. I don't claim to know the right balance. But this sort of thing is a misreading:

In short, those industries that rely on copyright to fuel their business should be even more grateful for fair use exceptions to their copyrights. The U.S. economy would shrink if it were purely based on compliance with traditional intellectual property strictures.

In other words, we need "leakage" in our copyright rules in order for copyright to work at all. Open source is a way of vastly broadening "fair use" in software, making it highly available for third-party usage. I'd therefore suggest that we'll see tremendous economic value created by open source.

As, in fact, we do. Imagine that.

This would be to imply that the government is a better judge of usage rights than the copyright holders. That's not true -- copyright holders are entirely free to allow companies like to Google to use their work in ways that benefit both parties, without resorting to government enforcement.

If sharing work is beneficial to the copyright holder, then they will do so. And if not sharing the work is detrimental to the copyright holder, as the above claims, then their competitors will gain an advantage.

In other words, if fair use is truly beneficial to both parties, we don't need no stinkin' laws.