Copyright Protection and Innovation: Evidence from Short Video Industry

摘要: Short videos have become an increasingly important form of digital copyright in the digital era. It is difficult to regulate the infringement of new forms of works like short videos. And due to the lack of exogenous variation of the copyright statute, solid evidence for the effect of copyright protection on innovation is still scarce. So this paper investigates the effect of a special campaign for intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in China on short video creation. With a random sample of 16,011 short videos created in 2019–2020 on one of the leading short video platforms, we find evidence for three important effects of the IPR protection policy: the innovation promotion effect, the propagation impediment effect and the quality stimulation effect. Specifically, strengthened IPR protection can encourage creators’ innovation behavior and stimulate the quality of works while it has a negative relationship with the propagation of …