Effects of Copyrights on Science - Evidence from the US Book Republication Program

We wish to thank seminar participants at the Becker Friedman Institute, Berkeley, Columbia, Copenhagen, CUNY, the Economic History Association, the European Economic Association, EPIP, the Federal Trade Commission, Harvard, London Business School, Munich, MIT, NBER, Odense, Rutgers, Science Po, the US Department of Justice, NYU, Rutgers, Zurich, as well as Lionel Bently, Chris Buccafusco, Kirk Doran, Glenn Ellison, Paul Heald, Margaret Kyle, Ryan Lampe, Frank Mueller-Langer, Abishek Nagaraj, Armin Schmutzler, Fabian Waldinger, and Thomas Wollmann for helpful comments. We are particularly grateful to Jim Edwards for sharing company records and letters for the J.W. Edwards Company, and to Kathleen Smith for searching for historical copies of BRP books at Stanford’s Green Library. Jacob Hartwig, Hailey Kwon, Mark Walsh, and Jason Weitze provided outstanding research assistance. Moser gratefully acknowledges financial support from the National Science Foundation through CAREER grant 1151180 and from INet’s Grant for Copyright and Creativity. Biasi gratefully acknowledges support from the Gregory Terrill Cox Fellowship and the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at Stanford Law. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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