Does Copyright Affect Reuse? Evidence from Google Books and Wikipedia
Authors | Abhishek Nagaraj |
|---|---|
Publication date | 2017 |
DOI | 10.1287/mnsc.2017.2767 |
Links | Original |
Does Copyright Affect Reuse? Evidence from Google Books and Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2017, written by Abhishek Nagaraj.
Overview
While digitization has greatly increased the reuse of knowledge, this study shows how these benefits might be mitigated by copyright restrictions. Author use the digitization of in-copyright and out-of-copyright issues of Baseball Digest magazine by Google Books to measure the impact of copyright on knowledge reuse in Wikipedia. Author exploit a feature of the 1909 Copyright Act whereby material published before 1964 has lapsed into the public domain, allowing for the causal estimation of the impact of copyright across this sharp cutoff. Author find that, while digitization encourages knowledge reuse, copyright restrictions reduce citations to copyrighted issues of Baseball Digest by up to 135% and affect readership by reducing traffic to affected pages by 20%. These impacts are highly uneven: copyright hurts the reuse of images rather than text and affects Wikipedia pages for less-popular players greater than more-popular ones. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2767. This paper was a...
