Against Intellectual Monopoly

its malevolent course and then observe the devastation from some helicopter flying high over the scene, we would rather learn
now from the past and begin erecting strong levees. Indeed, the historical evidence provides little or no support for the view that intellectual monopoly
is an effective method of increasing innovation when compared to welldefined but altogether "standard" property rights in competitive markets.4

Copyright and Music in the Eighteenth Century
    The effect of copyright is difficult to analyze because it is hard to get reliable
data prior to the nineteenth century. Copyright was already fairly ubiquitous
across Europe early in the nineteenth century, and its term there has changed
little since then.
    The one exception turns out to be in the case of classical music. Copyright
was unknown in the world of music until around the end of the eighteenth
century. As a result, a large proportion of classical music, which still today
accounts for about 3 percent of all music sales but obviously for a much
larger portion of music production until late in the nineteenth century, was
produced without the benefit of copyright protection.
    In this case, as in others, England was the path breaker. The Statute of
Anne did not cover printed music until a case filed by Johann Christian
Bach (the youngest son of the more famous Johann Sebastian) led, in 1777,
to a ruling that, after a relatively long sequence of failed attempts by other
composers, allowed for the extension. It took various additional decades for
the copyright logic to spread to the rest of Europe, which provides us with
an interesting natural experiment. Think for a moment of the history of
European music between 1780 and 1850, as, by the latter date, music had
become copyrightable all over Europe.
    • Which countries would you list in the "top three" of producers of
music during that period?
    • Would the United Kingdom make that list?
    • Would you agree or disagree with the following statement: "After 1780,
the quality and quantity of music produced in the United Kingdom
increased substantially"?
    • Make up your personal list of the top ten music composers of that
period. How many are British or worked in England?

    By the way, while evaluating the results of this small experiment, do
keep in mind that England was the most economically advanced country
in Europe during that period, and that both general and musical literacy
was more widespread there than in continental Europe. Here is a quotation
about a similar experiment; it comes from an unsuspecting source: Professor
Scherer is (or at least was) a strong supporter of intellectual property:
    The evolution of copyright from an occasional grant of royal privilege to a formal and eventually widespread system of law should in principle have enhanced
composers' income from publication. The evidence from our quantitative comparison of honoraria received by Beethoven, with no copyright law in his territory, and
Robert Schumann, benefiting from nearly universal European copyright, provides at
best questionable support for the hypothesis that copyright fundamentally changed
composers' fortunes. From the qualitative evidence on Giuseppe Verdi, who was the
first important composer to experience the new Italian copyright regime and devise
strategies to derive maximum advantage, it is clear that copyright could make a substantial difference. In the case of Verdi, greater remuneration through full exploitation of the copyright system led perceptibly to a lessening of composing effort.s
    Professor Scherer also exploited the variations between European countries' copyright law regarding music to conduct a third natural experiment.
He compared the average number of composers born per million people
per decade in various European countries. Turning first to England, he
considers the precopyright period 1700-52 and the postcopyright period
1767-1849. As controls, he looks also at what happened in Germany, Austria,
and Italy, where there was no change in copyright during this period. This is
summarized in Table 8.1.
    We see that the number of composers per million declined everywhere,
but it declined considerably faster in the United Kingdom after the introduction of copyright than it did in Germany or Austria, and at about the
same rate as it did Italy. So there is no evidence here that copyright increased
musical output.

    However, the evidence is mixed, because