SEARCH EVENTS
- This event has passed.
Loyalties v. royalties: Copyright’s creative incentives and collaboration
Friendship rewards us with a bond of loyalty and equality. The marketplace rewards us based on what we have to offer. When friends work together to create something, and when the market judges their creation to have value, this sets up a clash between realms. Should the pie of profits be sliced according to the values of friendship, or the values of the marketplace?
The answer matters for policymakers concerned with creative incentives because how satisfied people are with their monetary rewards can turn more on how much others are getting—their relative rewards—than on the absolute amount received. This talk will share empirical evidence from the music industry of a link between creators’ relative rewards and the quality of creative output, providing support for the incentive theory of copyright, and arguing that the joint authorship rule on license proceeds is an area of copyright law that gets creative incentives right.
Further reading:
‘Loyalties v. Royalties‘ (2023) 74 UC Hastings Law Journal 765
‘Co-Creating Equally‘ (2023) 96(3) Southern California Law Review 607
About the speaker
Professor Sarah Polcz’s (Acting Professor, UC Davis School of Law) research explores the intersection of law and psychological science. She is particularly interested in how basic cognitive processes relate to more complex social phenomena such as market culture and the moral intuitions underlying intellectual property law.
Tuesday 25 March
Time: 12-1pm
Venue: Law Lounge, Level 1, New Law Building Annex (F10A), Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus
This event is proudly hosted by the University of Sydney Law School, the Centre for AI, Trust and Governance, and the ARC Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society.