Another Reason to Listen to the Founding Fathers

Rufus Pollock of Cambridge University has released an economic paper analyzing the optimal duration of copyright. The first three and a half pages are approachable to all, but after that he dives into some tricky empiricism which leads him to conclude that the correct length of copyright from an economic standpoint is 14 years.

Although he recognizes the "significant implications for policy," I tend to doubt his work will be of much significance. Bear in mind that in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 17 leading economists (including 5 Nobel Prize winners!) submitted a brief establishing that the economic value of copyright extension was minimal.

It seems that the economics of lobbyists trumps academia.

[Pollock's Paper]