studies

This page looks at industry, academic and government studies of copyright collecting societies and rights administration.

It is under construction: we will be adding more information shortly.

There are no major academic overviews of collecting societies at a global level, although insights are offered in more restricted accounts of particular organisations such as GEMA or SACEM. An overview is provided by WIPO's document Collective Management of Copyright and Related Rights.

Most of the academic attention has focussed on the music sector, presumably because of the interaction of bundles of rights/uses (and this societies) and the size of the market. There is a useful overview in Collecting Societies in the Music Business (Apeldoorn: Maklu 89) edited by David Peeperkorn & Cees van Rij.

    economic and industry studies

Ruth Towse's 2001 Copyright & the Cultural Industries: Incentives and Earnings paper (PDF) offers estimates about the value of IP in the music sector and how the pie is sliced.

 Harold Vogel's Entertainment Industry Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 98), Richard Caves' Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art & Commerce (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 00) and Mancur Olson's bleak The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 71) discuss licensing principles and practices.

A perspective is provided by Shane Simpson's Music Business (London: Omnibus 02) and The Composer in the Market Place (London: Faber 75) by Alan Peacock & Ronald Weir.

The 1998 paper on New Strategy Combinations in the Intellectual Property Rights Arena: The Challenge to Established Principles of Reciprocity & Solidarity in Music Copyright by Roger Wallis, Charles Baden-Fuller, Martin Kretschmer & George Klimis highlights reciprocity and competition questions. The Global Music Industry in the Digital Environment: A Study of Strategic Intent & Policy Responses 1996-99 (PDF) by Kretschmer, Klimis & Wallis is particularly valuable.

More jaundiced accounts of high times and dodgy accounting in the music sector are highlighted here. A view from UNCTAD is provided in the 2000 Copyrights, Competition & Development: The Case of the Music Industry (PDF) by Birgitte Andersen, Zeljka Kozul-Wright & Richard Kozul-Wright

    history

We've pointed to works on the history of copyright in the Intellectual Property guide on this site.

From a collective rights administration perspective some works are of particular significance -

James Coover's Music Publishing, Copyright & Piracy in Victorian England (London: Mansell 85)

Benjamin Kaplan's An Unhurried View of Copyright (New York: Columbia Uni Press 68)

Lyman Patterson's Copyright In Historical Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt Uni Press)

Peter Shillingsburg's Pegasus In Harness: Victorian Publishing & W M Thackeray (Charlottesville: Uni Press of Virginia 91)

Simon Novell-Smith's International Copyright Law & the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press 68)

   next page  (Australia)