Ultimately, it is the
public which pays the price of piracy." Is there any proven
connection between the enforcement (or even the existence) of
intellectual property rights - and the preponderance of
creativity and/or of media entrepreneurship (publishing,
etc.)?
A: I don't have the relevant expertise to answer for music,
software, general literature, or even scholarly books. But
for scholarly journal articles (the main focus of the FOS
movement), there seems to be very little or no connection
between copyright and the productivity and creativity of
authors. I say this for two reasons. First, scholarly
authors tend to transfer copyright in their articles to the
journals that publish them. (Most scholars don't realize that
they could probably negotiate a different arrangement, but
that's another issue.) For most journal articles, then,
copyright protects publishers, not authors. But this hasn't
stopped scholars from writing journal articles. Second,
authors of scholarly journal articles are not paid for them,
whether they transfer copyright or not.
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