ABSTRACT
Digital technologies have negated the costs of replicating information, disrupting the production process in many creative content industries. Copyright policy may impede this effect if formal intellectual property rights raise costs and hamper the re-use of information goods in new products. Utilizing US federal court decisions that strengthened the breadth of existing copyrights, this paper examines the impact of those decisions on the re-use of copyrighted content in the popular music industry. With a novel, self-collected dataset that tracks re-use through ‘digital sampling’, I estimate the effect of the court decisions on the production process of hip-hop music through changes in sampling practices. I find that digital sampling, wherein new musical works are created in part from existing sound recordings, significantly decreased following a 1991 decision that strengthened rights for the original rightsholder, allowing rightsholders to restrict downstream re-use. This decrease in re-use was driven by changes in the intensive margin, with little effect on the propensity to include samples in a new song. Additionally, I find that this change was greatest in magnitude for the most prominent artists, and affected the creativity of new works by limiting the diversity of music that is re-used in new products. These findings contribute evidence for the design of optimal copyright policy in the digital era, and demonstrate the impact of strengthening copyright on the use of emerging technologies.
Watson, Jeremy, Copyright and the Production of Hip Hop Music (February 27, 2024).
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