Copyright and endogenous market structure

There is a new working paper out on Copyright & endogenous market structure: A glimpse from the journal-publishing market. It is by Giovanni B. Ramello. The abstract reads,

This article explores the journal publishing industry in order to shed light on the overall economic consequences of copyright in markets. Since the rationale for copyright is among others to promise some market power to the holder of the successful copyrighted item, it also provides incentives to preserve and extend market power. A regular trait of copyright industries is high concentration and the creation of large catalogues of copyrights in the hands of incumbents. This outcome can be observed as the aggregation of rights and is one of the pivotal strategies for obtaining or extending market power, consistently with findings in other cases. Journal publishing is no different in this respect from other copyright industries, and in the last decade has experienced a similar trajectory, leading to a highly concentrated industry in which a handful of large firms increasingly control a substantial part of the market. It also provides a clear example of the effect of copyright dynamics on market structure, suggesting that a different attitude should be taken in lawmaking and law enforcement.

So one unintended consequence of copyright, for academic publishing at least, is simply that given some market power, via copyright, the "monopolist" will seek to expand this power by making acquisitions and thereby obtain even more dominance in the market. Many would argue that this has happened in economics. As the Economic Logician says,

The obvious example is Elsevier, which has reached now a market share that should trigger anti-trust investigations along with profit margin in the order of 30%. The situation is quite bad in Economics, as scholarly societies have done little to prevent Elsevier taking hold of the major field journals, thereby making it essential to any tenure file. And given this, research libraries have no choice but subscribe to those journals, falling in the trap of the monopolist.