Wie Copyright die Wikipedia zurückhält

Abhishek Nagaraj, ein Ökonom am MIT, hat anhand 2008 auf Google Books hochgeladener Ausgaben eines Baseball-Magazins die Auswirkungen des Copyrights auf die Public Domain und unsere Nutzung von Informationen untersucht. Denn der Teil der Magazine, der vor 1964 erschienen ist, ist bereits gemeinfrei. Nagaraj konnte nun untersuchen, wie sich die Wikipediaseiten von früheren Baseballspielern, deren Informationen gemeinfrei sind, im Vergleich zu denen entwickeln, deren Informationen aus dem Magazin noch dem Copyright unterliegen.

The Atlantic:

By comparing the two groups, Nagaraj could see the direct effects of copyright on the articles in terms of length, number of images, and traffic. That first metric — length — proved resilient to the copyright divide. Words are easy to rescue from private-ownership, and the Wikipedia authors simply rewrote the information still owned by the Digest. Every article, post-digitization, became on average much longer.

Im Gegensatz zu reproduzierbaren Informationen in Textform ist das Copyright auf Fotos schwerwiegender:

More recent players, covered by privately-owned parts of Baseball Digest, had half as many images on their pages as did old-timers.

Die fehlende Verbreitung von Fotos hat Konsequenzen auf die betroffenen Seiten:

And the effects of this — of just having an image on the page — cascaded to other metrics. „Out-of-copyright“ players‘ pages saw a significant boost in traffic.

Das Ergebnis der Untersuchung von Nagaraj ist wenig überraschend:

Nagaraj controlled for much in his study: the talent of players, their left-handedness, the duration of their careers, and he even controlled for the general drop-off of editing on Wikipedia. His report is clear: Copyright law affects to some degree what information makes its way onto Wikipedia, but what it more strongly affects is how we use that information once it’s there. In other words, digitizing any knowledge increases an article’s text, but only digitizing public domain images makes articles more frequently updated and visited. This may be in part due to the particularities of Google’s algorithm, which rewards updates and images. Nagaraj is studying this next, in fact, comparing an article’s Page Rank to its Digest copyright status.

And those results are exciting, because Nagaraj’s found a way to do something rare. His Baseball Digest is a probe we need: into how copyright law controls one community, into how it impoverishes one set of knowledge, and into how it makes all knowledge less usable. Ain’t no Nicomachean Ethics required.

Ein weiteres Beispiel dafür, warum die Schutzfristen massiv gesenkt werden müssen.