John Fountain sent me an email about the first antibiotics, the sulfa drugs. I will quote (slightly edited) what he said:

I found an fascinating example of the way in which competition based on an old (1909) but expired (by 1930's) patent on a sulfanimide used in the dye industry ushered in in the antibiotic revolution in the mid 1930's.

The basics are contained in a wikipedia article.

The interesting facts are that the commercially developed chemical entity (Bayer I think) called Prontosil, for which patents were granted in the 30's, proved to be a flop commercially...because in the human body it broke down into bits and pieces. One piece - the "sulfa" - was the real "active ingredient. I like the authors description here "The result was a sulfa craze"! I guess at that time - 1930's - chemicals naturally occuring in the body weren't themselves patentable!!

It has been over a decade before Napster effectively ended copyright for recorded music. Music sales are down. But did copyright encourage creation of new music? Has the quantity of new music suffered on account of the effective elimination of copyright? We now have a detailed study. From the abstract:

In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers' revenue but the surplus they derive from new music. The legal monopoly created by copyright is justified by its encouragement of the creation of new works, but there is little evidence on this relationship...We assemble a novel dataset on the number of high quality works released annually, since 1960, derived from retrospective critical assessments of music such best-of-the-decade lists. This allows a comparison of the quantity of new albums since Napster to 1) its pre-Napster level, 2) pre-Napster trends, and 3) a possible control, the volume of new songs since the iTunes Music Store's revitalization of the single. We find no evidence that changes since Napster have affected the quantity of new recorded music or artists coming to market.

(via George Leef) What will we do when every word in the English language is trademarked?

David Andolfato has a nice post about Canadian "authors" and copyright. But especially look at the comments: according to Phil Koop the American Banker's Association has somehow managed to get exclusive rights to the numbers that identify securities...

Somehow I don't think he needed copyright to do this. Notice that Amazon unilaterally set the terms of the deal - do you suppose they would do differently without copyright?

No doubt the FDA has a lot to answer for with respect to the slowdown in medical innovation. It's funny though: if we got rid of the FDA then we could get rid of patents as well - imagine a pharmaceutical industry that innovated like the computer industry.

As you know no way she could do this without copyright...

We economists are frequently accused of making too many assumptions. As a rule we look to evidence for our facts not to assumptions. Not so the rest of the world.

How could they not given they read Michele and me?

A very nice presentation by Nicholas Gruen about the Web 2.0 - including the rather important issue of copyright.