Cory Doctorow posted this over on BoingBoing.

Rufus Pollock, a PhD candidate in economics at Cambridge University, has just released “Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright,” a brilliant new paper on the economically optimal term of copyright. He’s presenting it in Berlin this week, but it’s already online. Here’s the abstract:

The optimal level for copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. This paper contributes several new results on this issue divided into two parts. In the first, a parsimonious theoretical model is used to prove several novel propositions about the optimal level of protection. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) optimal copyright falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitization) and that (b) the optimal level of copyright will, in general, fall over time. The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fourteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are too long.

14 years! Cool!

The title of Pollock’s paper: “Forever Minus A Day” comes from a suggestion by Jack Valenti when he was the head of the MPAA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was being crammed through Congress.

Sonny Bono’s widow, Mary (who carried his legislative torch after he hugged a tree a little too quickly on skis) stated that what Sonny really wanted was for copyright to last forever but apparently this was not practical because it would be unconstitutional.

That’s when Valenti piped up that maybe the way to skirt around that pesky ol’ Constitution would be to enshrine copyright term as “forever less a day”. Way to go, Jack. That’s applying the ol’ Hollywood legal noodle. Putz.

Thank your lucky stars we have people like Rufus Pollock doing their best to think differently and point us along a more rational path.

You can download a copy of Pollock’s full paper here.

Now if we could only get the folks at Disney to read this thing.

Cheers.