Abstract
Rights entitlement (1) is crucial under aesthetic qualification because of another feature of aesthetic processes we mentioned in chapter 6: self-certification.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The “entitlement” is the “entitlement to prevail in case of conflictual interests of the parties” (Calabresi, Melamed (1972)).
Coase (1960), Veljanosky (1982), Stephen (1988) pp. 27–40, 41–63. Negotiation should make the rights “entitlement” indifferent under conditions of: perfect information, rational behavior of the agents, competitive markets, absence of transaction costs and of wealth effects. Negotiation need not necessarily be effective. It may be potential, following a Kaldar-Hicks version of the Pareto principle. In this case the right can be efficiently allocated to the party who should support the higher cost to defend himself against its violation, because he will always be able to refund the other for his loss, with a net welfare increase for himself and for society.
Assuming that no wealth effects occur, in other words, that the “equivalent variation in income” is equal to the “compensating variation in income”. Neither ask/offer kinds of problems nor bargaining strategies of the parties (for example “chicken-game”-like) are taken into account. This is in order here to isolate the mere effects of the information asymmetry due to aesthetic qualification and the “certification” strategies arising from it (see Sugden (1988)).
To put it another way: who can protect himself at the lower cost? The producer. The entitlement should therefore be given to the consumer, compelling the producer to supply protection to society at the lower cost (which is the cost of abandoning his rent position). The entitlement could also be seen as the result of the application of Posner’s position: “When transaction costs are prohibitive, rights should be assigned to those who value them the most” (Veljanovsky (1982)), as the consumers’ large numbers are a source of effective negotiation impossibility.
Burrows, Veljanovski (1981), pp.170–171.
Stephen (1988) p.61.
Bonhams auction house has organized a new great sale of fakes (including those of Rembrandt and Van Gogh) at the end of 1992. Some years ago this house auctioned a set of copies by Tom Keating, the greatest living English forger of ancient paintings. He produced more than two thousand fakes in more than twenty years of undisturbed work. Auction prices reached the not insignificant level of £ 30, 000 per copy. The Times reports that a New York Gallery (“True Fakes”) has recently exhibited Picasso, Miro, and Leger’ s fakes.
I am obliged for this definition to Tony Puu of the University of Umea and Stockholm, who first used it referring to cultural goods during an ICARE seminar in Venice, May 6, 1992.
Buchanan, Tollison, Tullock (1980) and Rowley, Tollison, Tullock (1988).
This is closely similar to the case of theft prevention. (Tullock (1967)).
Some wider significant historical evidence of the uselessness of the copyright as a legal construct can be found in O’Hare (1982), where the illuminating case of the American eighteenth century unprotected market versus the British protected market is discussed. The American publishers’ need to saturate the market with the first printing, to prevent piracy, made them substitute negotiations on the existing editions on the British market with those on “secret manuscript copies of works before their publication in Britain”. “The price at which these secret manuscripts changed hands often exceeded the royalties British authors received from the entire British editions of their works, and did so in a country with a comparable but less wealthy population” (O’Hara (1982) p.34).
Some kind of producer’ s liability could in this case be worked out on a “Learned Hand formula” basis that is under the principle: “The defendant is guilty of negligence if the loss caused by the event (…) multiplied by the probability of the event occurring, P, exceeds the cost of the precautions that the defendant might have taken to avert it, C” (Hirsch (1979)).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mossetto, G. (1993). The Entitlement of Rights: Genuine and Fake. In: Aesthetics and Economics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8236-0_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8236-0_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4277-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8236-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive