Blogiversary, Mark 1: Looking Forward

It’s hard to believe that today marks the one-year anniversary of when I first posted to this blog in earnest (I started it a few months earlier but hadn’t posted anything beyond a “hello world” post). In the process I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how many people are interested in what is surely one of the more esoteric blogs about intellectual property law out there.

I have an awful lot in the backlog of stuff to share, including a lot of tidbits about sound recording copyright and the White-Smith decision, as well as a post I really should get out soon on Copyright and the 11th Amendment/Sovereign Immunity.  However, the biggest project I’m working on is an empirical project, bringing together statistics of copyright in America from 1790 through 2015.  Here’s a teaser of what I’m working on (with my coauthor Richard Schwinn, an economist):

This chart shows the number of copyright registrations made, per 100,000 people, per year, with the color of the line representing the cost of registration adjusted for inflation.  This is only the tip of the iceberg – the statistics I’ve assembled are broken down for the type of work for 1870 to the present, and I have rates of renewal for 1909-2005 as well for all classes.  A paper that hopefully lays it out all is in the works.  Here’s to another great blog-year.