Copyright, duplication of information and economic analysis: the case of the university libraries

Abstract

Economic analysis plays an important role in the modern debate on copyright. In fact, copyright is presented in literature as the "legal remedy" to the collapse of the market of creativity, in the sense that the proceeds deriving from the ownership of the exclusive right procure for the authors the financial incentive to continue to dedicate themselves to the creation of new works of genius. The final objective of copyright is therefore public: the promotion of knowing and knowledge.
A copyright represents the price that society pays the author/monopolist to be able to continue to have access to new ideas. In that sense it constitutes an "incentive to create" paid by society to the creators.
In line with this assumption it appears therefore necessary to condemn tout court all those acts that alter the rewarding mechanism foreseen by the laws on intellectual property, usually inserted into the single category of the non-authorized duplication of information protected by copyright, but which in fact includes cases in point that are very different by nature and meaning, among which so-called "piracy" and private duplication appear at the extremes.
However, although the general principle of stimulating the producers of new ideas and protecting their ownership certainly makes sense and imposes serious attention, by virtue of the public objective that determined the establishment of copyright, it is possible to glimpse situations in which such an axiom can be violated. And it is precisely economic literature, which usually sustains the reasons for the incentive, that suggests greater caution in making rushed generalizations, and that indeed shows how the negative judgement on duplication of information, when extended indiscriminately to any form of reproduction, can result questionable if not dangerous: the problem under examination is articulate precisely because of the plurality of the ways in which duplication may be substantiated and the diversity of their meaning has consequences - both economic and non-economic - which are much more complex and requires a more refined approach, at the cost of perverse effects on crucial social activities.
One of the situations in which caution must be used is that of the duplication of information protected by the copyright inside the university libraries for didactic, study and research reasons. This treatise concentrates on this case (however those activities of duplication usually done outside the university, and which constitute a parallel and substitutive production of text books carried out by some individuals to avoid, exclusively, paying the cover price, are not included in the case in point).
The law on copyright is justified by the necessity to remunerate the creators of an intellectual work which has strong social effects. Therefore the activities that violate it certainly damage this objective. Nevertheless it is possible to identify situations in which the law on copyright creates inflexibilities that can among other things generate damaging consequences, both at economic and social level, and go in some way against the objectives that the same law tries to achieve.
The lack of occurrence of these specificities can have the prerogative of discontenting both the consumers and the owners or licensees of the rights so leading to a situation of inefficiency.
It is in this perspective that there is a request for a favourable regime for the free diffusion and reproduction of the wealth of information found within university libraries which were established for the same scopes as those of the laws on copyright: to renew and spread knowledge.
Because universities contribute in a decisive way to creative and inventive activities, which will then possibly be privately taken over by third parties, this request appears reasonable and necessary for the perpetration of the same and economically efficient.