Cost of Not Sharing

The German economic historian Eckhard Höffner contends in his work "No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion" that the near absence of copyright law in eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany laid the groundwork for the "Gründerzeit"—the enormous wave of economic growth that Deutschland experienced in the middle and later nineteenth century.

Höffner noted that an "incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany" by the 1830s. 14,000 publications appeared in the region in 1836, widely distributed thanks to the presence of "plagiarizers"—competing publishing houses unafraid of infringement suits. The result was a cheap mass book market catering to a huge reading public. Britain, on the other hand, saw "deplorable progress" at this same time with only about 1,000 new works produced annually, 10 times fewer than in Germany. With stronger copyright guarantees guarding their backs, like the “Statute of Anne" copyright ordinance of 1710, London publishers profited from the release of limited edition books. But the nation as a whole suffered. "It was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900."

However according to the economic historian Angus Maddison Germany was not the only country that was outgrowing Britain at that time: “Growth was faster than in the United Kingdom in most of Western and Eastern Europe, in Ireland, in all the Western Offshoots, in Latin America, and Japan.”

In the article written by Matthew Lasar for arstechnica.com where Höffner’s work is discussed, Lasar noted that even if the argument were expanded beyond Germany, it appears that we're really talking about world copyright policy versus London and its immediate environs. True enough, with the Statute of Anne in cement by the 1770s, "the general practice among London booksellers was to publish new books in low volumes and at high prices." On the other hand, just about everywhere else publishing was something of a free-for-all.

Eckhard Höffner proffers some intriguing answers to the question “how does copyright rules extend or discourage the dissemination of knowledge and productivity in any historical period.” If Höffner is proven correct then it would seem that, at least theoretically, piracy or the disregard of copyright may prove a significant factor in accelerating the economic development of developing countries.

Linus Madamba
Post#13