Readers of these columns have heard me lament  in the past about the fact that intellectual property policy is an “evidence-free zone”.  It is the trickiest of regulatory matters to get the right level of intellectual property protection – giving incentives to creators and distributors, yet not overly burdening future innovators or imposing unnecessary monopoly prices on consumers. Getting this balance right should be a matter of empiricism, not faith. We do, for example, have good evidence about what kind of policies on database rights and on state generated data  – such as maps, traffic and weather information – actually work best. In each case, the European Union has picked a plausible  position – stronger rights will mean more production and innovation – and seen it convincingly falsified through empirical analysis.

The same is true with the length of our copyright term. Brilliant economists, including five Nobel laureates, have pointed out that our current copyright terms are far too long. We extend copyright long beyond the time necessary to provide incentives to create and distribute. One recent economic study suggests that the optimal term is 15 years.  Others have recommended even shorter terms. I would favour 28 years, renewable for another 28 if the author desires. We give life plus 70. Worse, since as much as 98 per cent of all copyrighted material is currently commercially unavailable that means we lock up most of our culture just at the moment when we could have been digitising it and putting it on the web for the world to share. A system that required renewal for a modest fee in order to keep the copyright would solve these problems. We have signed treaties that forbid us from doing anything so sensible.