Statistical analysis goes neg.

Jiayang Sun, Raymond S. Ray, Yiying Fan, “Does Copyright Law Promote Creativity? An Empirical Analysis of Copyright's Bounty,” Vanderbilt Law Review, 11-xx-2009, https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1483&context=vlr

The argument may be simply summarized: if a little copyright is good, more is better. While logical, this position is still a theory and, like all theories, can be tested. Unfortunately, even though copyright has existed and continuously expanded for hundreds of years, there has been little research done to test the theoretical basis for copyright's expansion.' 3 In fact, so little has been done that one author specifically pled for more empirical research. 14 This study responds to that need.

In this Article, we use statistical analysis to examine whether changes in copyright law influence the number of new works created. Relying upon U.S. copyright registrations from 1870 through 2006 as a proxy for the number of works created, we consider how four variables-population, the economy, changes in the law (both legislative and judicial), and technology-influenced new copyright registrations. From the data, we test the following hypotheses. The major hypothesis is that any change in copyright protection will result in changes in the number of works produced. The related minor hypotheses are that increasing copyright protection will increase the number of works produced and-its corollary-that decreasing copyright protection will reduce the number of works produced.

Despite the logic of the theory that increasing copyright protection will increase the number of copyrighted works, the data do not support it. Instead, our findings demonstrate that the historic long-run growth in new copyrighted works is largely a function of population. 15 Sharp changes are mostly due to procedural shifts in copyright registration, such as those created by the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988.16