Economics and Copyright in Works of Artistic Craftsmanship.pdfVIP

Economics and Copyright in Works of Artistic Craftsmanship Page 1 of 18 Economics and Copyright in Works of Artistic Craftsmanship Michael Rushton Visiting Scholar, Erasmus University Rotterdam Professor of Economics, University of Regina Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada S4S 0A2 Michael.Rushton@uregina.ca Go back to the AHRB Centres publication section. Prepared for presentation at the Shepherd and Wedderburn Centre for Research into Intellectual Property and Technology (SCRIPT) at the University of Edinburgh, October 30, 2000. This is a draft version of the paper; comments and suggestions are most welcome. The term “works of artistic craftsmanship” appears in the copyright legislation of Canada,[1] the US, [2] and the UK, [3] as a type of work for which the creator is entitled to copyright protection. Each of these countries also has legislation governing designs, and so there is some attempt to define borders in what has always been a gray area. But the question of the appropriate domain of copyright, and in particular a definition of artistic craftsmanship, remains. The US and the UK have chosen different solutions, with more always being proposed. The issues raised in the seminal case on the subject, Hensher v. Restawile,[4] have not yet been satisfactorally resolved. This paper tries to shed some light on the artistic craftsmanship question by taking a few steps back, and begins by asking what is the purpose of copyright. From there we can assess the various ideas that have been put forward on artistic craftsmanship, in light of what things we think should, or should not, be under copyright’s umbrella. The approach I will take is economic. Economic analysis has previously been applied to copyright,[5] trademarks, [6] and moral rights, [7] all of which will have some bearing on the issue at hand. However, it should be noted that the “law and economics” tradition in the intellectual property field is usually