Incentive And Access: The Economic Research On The Copyright System

Copyright law is a law to form social culture of one country. Since copyright belongs to the system of intellectual property rights, its object of protection is the creature of idea. So it decides that copyright must motivate the author to create works by endowing them with certain proprietary rights. And at the same time copyright has the constitutional purpose to increase the knowledge and learning. Therefore, it must set public domain to promote the public access to the innovation in order to diffuse the works and enhance the social interests. It is obvious that copyright law established a basic equilibrium of incentive and access between author and user essentially. This paper mainly discusses the feasibility of applying the economic method to the copyright system in the works market. Concretely this paper probes into the problem of interest equilibrium between the author, disseminator and user, and attempts to solve the dilemma of so-called "incentive and access" in order to achieve the incentive to the author and access to the user.Thereinto, chapter two is the history of copyright system. Firstly, this part describes the change of copyright system in history from the perspective of change of copying technology. Furthermore this part specially narrates the development course of copyright in China. Chapter three is the literature review of economics on copyright. By reviewing all economics theory on copyright, this part finds out a clue of the development in this fields and points out the possible tendency of the development. Chapter four mainly focuses on the optimal equilibrium of "incentive and access" and summarizes the copyright system as the equilibrium between author and user. On the basis of explaining the three forms of equilibrium of incentive and access, this part puts forward that the solution of optimal protection of copyright will achieve the equilibrium of incentive and access between the relative persons. By setting multi-angle protection of copyright, including copyright length, breadth and height, we establish optimal copyright protection model, and solve the dilemma by empirical model on global audio-visual industry. The fifth chapter mainly discusses inter-generational equilibrium of incentive and access between the original creator and sequential innovator when the creative activity has the cumulative effect. We probe into the two kinds of markets with the product differentiation theory, that is, apply the horizontal differentiation model with ranking effect in horizontal differential market and apply the vertical differential model with innovation on the basis of imitation in vertical differential market. With the theoretical model, this part makes sure of the frontier of originality which can achieve the equilibrium between the protection of creative revenue and incentive to the sequential innovation. Chapter six divides copying technology into information-substitute technology and information-complementary technology. Then we bring forward the base period equilibrium which is formed in the beginning of the copyright system, and analyze the different effects that two kinds of technology have on the time equilibrium of copyright law.This paper draws the conclusions as followed. Firstly, the equilibrium of incentive and access can be divided into three levels, that is, copyright length, breadth and height. And the empirical study has shown that copyright length has positive correlation with the number of music works. This means extend of copyright duration is benefit for the increase of works number. Copyright breadth has negative correlation with the number of music works. This means expand of copyright scope does harm to the increase of works number. Copyright height has negative correlation with the number of music works. This means the more serious copyright law, the less new works. Thirdly, to solve the problem of incentive and access in horizontal differential market, we should deal with it in different ways: endow the original work with strong ranking effect with strong copyright protection and endow the new works with certain market scale with the copyright protection. In the vertical differential market, new works innovate on the basis of imitating the original one. When the ration of quality of two works is larger than the coefficient of innovation effect on the basis of imitation, the difference of quality between two works can be achieved. Fourthly, the change of traditional technology occurs along the track of higher and higher substitution, while the change of digital technology occurs along the track of higher and higher complementation.In a word, this paper explores the copyright system and analyzes optimal equilibrium, inter-generational equilibrium and time equilibrium of incentive and access from the angle of law and economics. This paper provides a further understanding of copyright system and puts forward some referenced ideas for the real problem in this field.