Ramello, Giovanni B. --- "Private appropriability and sharing of knowledge: convergence or contradiction? The opposite tragedy of the creative commons" [2005] ELECD 93; in Takeyama, N. Lisa; Gordon, J. Wendy; Towse, Ruth (eds), "Developments in the Economics of Copyright" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: Developments in the Economics of Copyright

Editor(s): Takeyama, N. Lisa; Gordon, J. Wendy; Towse, Ruth

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843769309

Section: Chapter 7

Section Title: Private appropriability and sharing of knowledge: convergence or contradiction? The opposite tragedy of the creative commons

Author(s): Ramello, Giovanni B.

Number of pages: 22

Extract:

7. Private appropriability and sharing
of knowledge: convergence or
contradiction? The opposite
tragedy of the creative commons
Giovanni B. Ramello

7.1 INTRODUCTION

One of the many Greek myths tells how Eos, goddess of dawn, fell in love
with a handsome young man of royal Trojan blood, Tithonus. The goddess
was so taken with Tithonus that she asked Zeus to make him immortal, so
that they could be happy together forever. The wish was granted but turned
out to be a double-edged sword, because the gift of immortality did not
come with perpetual youth. So as time went by, and Tithonus withered and
grew old, the passion of the goddess died away.
Now, every myth contains a metaphor designed to teach us something.
The lesson we can draw here is that, when policy design fails to accurately
grasp the nature of the reality, the outcomes of the policy can be very
different from those envisaged. In this chapter we shall argue that, due to
analytical shortcomings, the present-day policy of extending and strength-
ening copyright is liable to produce inefficient outcomes in the knowledge
domain, analogous to those described in the above myth.
Note that we are not here disputing copyright as it was, say, up until the
1990s, when it seemed to adequately balance the public need for access to
information with the provision of a private incentive to creators ­ a state of
affairs which, for the sake of simplicity, I have defined as `minimal copy-
right'. ...