Does copyright affect reuse? : evidence from the Google Books Digitization Project

Abstract

While digitization projects like Google Books have dramatically increased access to digital content, in this study I show how the ability to reuse such information and deliver value to end-users depends crucially on features of copyright law. I use the digitization of both copyrighted and non-copyrighted issues of one publication digitized under Google Books, Baseball Digest, to measure the impact of copyright on a prominent venue for reuse: Wikipedia. I find that digitization causes a significant increase in content on Wikipedia pages, but copyright hurts both the extent of reuse and thereby the level of internet traffic to affected Wikipedia pages. Specific features of copyright law like "fair use" produce nuanced effects: the impact of copyright is more pronounced for images compared to text and becomes economically significant only post-digitization.