Research seminar – Wednesday 7 February 2018, 16.00 – Room EB 602 (Executive Business Centre)

The European Commission proposal to harmonize fair remuneration in Member States in EC ‘on copyright in the Digital Single Market’ COM(2016) 593 final included the proposal to harmonise a right to contract reversion. Fair remuneration is an ambiguous concept for economists: some EC documents imply the policy is required for efficiency purposes, in others purely for equity reasons. Copyright to an extent attempts to deal with both and also at times confuses the two. This seminar tries to disentangle these issues. Recent work in law and economics and in economics on reversionary rights as well as a well-established body of research in cultural economics on labour markets of authors and performers in the cultural and media industries is reviewed and shows both the variety of influences on motivation, incentives and contracts for creators, as well as exposing the difficulties of empirical research in this area.

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