Copyright and Artists: A View From Cultural Economics

Abstract Most of the standard economic literature on copyright ignores a number of aspects that have considerable significance for cultural production and for artists, the primary creators of copyright works, the supply of which copyright is supposed to stimulate. Specifically, there is little mention in that literature of moral rights, no distinction is made between copyright for authors and neighbouring rights for performers, the distributional effects of copyright are barely referred to, and the question of how much artists earn from copyright is ignored. In this article, I survey work that relates copyright and cultural economics showing that cultural economics offers another view to the ‘standard’ economics of copyright. Moreover, the case for government intervention in the arts and heritage made by cultural economists has resonance for the economic rationale of copyright.