Today opera fans in the United States are rich, old, and increasingly rare. But it wasn’t always that way. In the Eighteenth Century, opera was the closest thing to mass entertainment, especially in Italy. And that fact provides a platform for economists Michela Giorcelli and Petra Moser to say something interesting about the effect of copyright law on creativity. Giorcelli and Moser’s Copyright and Creativity – Evidence from Italian Operas, is a paper I liked, lots.
Giorcelli and Moser’s paper is a natural experiment using historical data surrounding an “external shock” – viz., Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of northern Italy between 1796 and 1802. The northern Italian states of Lombardy and Venetia adopted copyright laws in 1801, as a direct consequence of French rule. Six other Italian states studied by Giorcelli and Moser only began adopting copyright laws during a period that began a quarter-century later. Giorcelli and Moser collect historical data on 2,598 operas that premiered across the eight Italian states in question between 1770 and 1900, the most fertile years of Italian opera production, and a period that both precedes and follows the adoption of copyright by Lombardy and Venetia. Continue reading "A Lesson from the History of Italian Opera: Some Copyright Good/More Copyright Useless"
