Generating value from the public domain

• Author: Kristofer Erickson
• Position: Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow, CREATe, School of Law, University of Glasgow, UK

A study entitled Copyright and the Value of the Public Domain recently published by the UK Intellectual Property Office and cofunded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) highlights the huge value of the public domain for both consumers and innovators.

Puzzlingly, there has been little scrutiny of the role of the public domain in fostering innovation. This new research is one of the first empirical attempts to map the process of value creation from public domain inputs for the creative industries, although much work remains to be done.

My co-authors (Paul Heald, Fabian Homberg, Martin Kretschmer and Dinusha Mendis) and I argue that rather than focusing only on the economic benefits generated by the traditionally understood “copyright industries”, we ought to consider the innovative potential and value generated by inputs which originate not only from copyright-protected material, but from material residing in the public domain. Doing so reveals a rich and dynamic interchange between privately held intellectual property (IP) rights and the public culture within which creative goods are produced.

Mapping the value of the public domain

To generate empirical evidence about the size and value of the public domain, we turned to the online encyclopedia resource Wikipedia. With lead author Professor Paul Heald of the University of Illinois, USA, we examined the biographical pages of some 1,700 musical composers and literary authors from the 19th and 20th centuries. We were interested to know whether the availability of public-domain images of historical figures meant that pages about them were more likely to feature photographs of them.

We found that, counterintuitively, the earlier an author or musician was born, the more likely their page was to be accompanied by an image. Although camera technology became widespread during the twentieth century, authors and musicians born in the last 80 years are far less likely to be accompanied by a photograph. This is due to the effect of the public domain – pictures taken of famous people from the twentieth century are likely to be still in copyright and most cannot be used on a website like Wikipedia without permission.

This is more than a mere annoyance to Wikipedia editors and visitors. The missing images represent a loss of value to society. To illustrate this, we calculated the advertising revenue that a commercial website would expect to earn from individual pages where the presence of...