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A Healthy Public Domain Generates Millions in Economic Value—not Bad for ‘Free’

posted by martyb on Friday March 27 2015, @10:51PM   
from the priceless dept.

AnonTechie writes with news of a story appearing in The Conversation:

It’s frequently claimed that copyright law should be made more restrictive and copyright terms extended in order to provide an incentive for content creators.

But with growing use of works put into the public domain or released under free and permissive licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL and its derivatives, it’s possible to argue the opposite — that freely-available works also generate value.

Public domain works — those that exist without restriction on use either because their copyright term has expired or because they fall outside of the scope of copyright protection — create significant economic benefits, according to research my colleagues and I have conducted, now published in a report for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office. ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-and-the-value-of-the-public-domain )

• Re:greed hurts everyone (Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday March 28 2015, @07:19PM

  by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday March 28 2015, @07:19PM (#163622) Homepage

  You misunderstand. Greed is good for ME, or at least, it puts me in a better position, with power over everyone else, if only in the short term. Why would sociopaths give a single damn about anyone else?

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