LXer: The Bizarro, Fact-free World Of Copyright Policymaking
 

Published at LXer:

That something does what it's supposed to is usually the baseline for evaluating public policy. It's certainly what I expected to find as I researched my (shameless self-promotion alert) just-published book, Copyfight: The global politics of digital copyright reform. I'm an economist and political scientist by training, and also spent six years as an economist with the Parliamentary Information and Research Service, the Canadian equivalent of the Congressional Research Service. Coming cold to the wonderful, wooly world of copyright, I expected that such a long-lived institution would be grounded at least partly in empirical evidence that it, you know, actually promotes the creation and dissemination of music, books and so on.

Read More...