A Note on Incentives, Rights, and the Public Domain in Copyright Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Copyright subject matter and copyright scope have undergone significant expansion since the enactment of the Statute of Anne, the world’s first copyright statute, in 18th century England. Whereas copyright maximalists welcome that expansion, copyright minimalists oppose it. In spite of their divergence, maximalists and minimalists in North America in large part share a view of copyright law as an instrument intended to provide incentives for creativity in the name of the public interest. This paper first develops the observation that the so-called “copyright wars” unfold on the basis of a largely shared, and therefore uncontested, instrumentalist terrain. The paper then goes on to show that even the minimalist iteration of the instrumentalist account of copyright law is entangled with the very expansion of copyright law it seeks to criticize. The paper concludes by sketching largely unexplored affinities between a non-instrumentalist (i.e. rights-based) account of copyright law and the affirmation of a vigorous public domain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".