The Atlantic published an Article titled The Hole in Our Collective Memory at the end of July. The article by Rebecca Rosen presents a study about the availability of copyrighted works from different decades.

According to the article the study comes to the conclusion, that copyright law causes books that are still under copyright protection to be more likely to be out of print than those in the public domain.

The conclusion from that is that copyright owners are not in fact monetizing the works they own, but rather let them fade into obscurity my not making them available. So while there is no profit from them being made, society is also loosing out on them because intellectual substance is locked away.

Here is to hope that we can reverse at least some of the current state of IP-Stupidity by using studies like this. After all, this basically proves that the current copyright law achieves the opposite of what was intended when the original copyright laws were passed.

Maybe we need to do the same thing for patents. After all, many have realised that the current patent regime harms innovation rather than fuelling it. If we could actually scientifically prove this realisation, maybe we have a chance of making some changes there as well.