The 2024 edition of our series of reports on the state of the entertainment industries in the internet era. This edition expands our traditional categories to cover more industry segments than ever, offering a complete look at how people are Listening, Watching, Reading, and Playing in 2024. Read the full report »
Published in conjunction with CCIA Research Center.
Over the last few years, there has been an increasing drumbeat for greater internet regulation. But even the most well-intended policy approaches may have completely unexpected negative consequences that may outweigh the benefits sought by the regulation in the first place. Those benefits can be difficult to achieve and difficult to measure, while this paper finds that such regulations frequently have a negative impact on investment in covered internet companies, with declines ranging from 15% to 73%.
Read the full report below, or download the info sheet.
Published by The Copia Institute & CCIA Research Center. Written by Mike Masnick.
Imagine if you had a choice of a dozen Internet service providers (ISPs), all competing to provide next-generation fiber broadband at affordable rates. Imagine if these ISPs cared about customer service and the communities they serve. Then imagine if you could switch between these providers in a matter of seconds with only a few online clicks. This is the unrealized potential of the open access wholesale fiber model, whose benefits have been documented for years—yet routinely disregarded by U.S. telecom policymakers in favor of consolidation, powerful gatekeepers, and limited competition.
This report examines data from the US and around the world to explore the current state of broadband in America, and the potential for an open access fiber model to create robust competition and bring about more widespread access, better service, and lower prices.
As debates have increased over the appropriate levels of liability that should be placed on internet platforms, there has been precious little research looking into the actual impact of strong intermediary and platform protections from liability on innovation and investment. This paper takes an initial look at different legal regimes across different times and regions to attempt to separate out the impact. By using cross-regional comparisons, as well as changes over time within certain countries, we explore the actual impact of different levels of platform protection and how it impacts investment in innovation.
The 2019 edition of our series of reports on the state of the entertainment industry in the internet era. A close look at the latest data on the music, video, book, and video game industries that not only does digital technology continue to drive a huge amount of creativity and fuel new and different businesses, it is leading massive revenue growth in many traditional entertainment businesses as well.
The Copia Institute and the Center for a New American Security are working together on an ongoing project to facilitate better communication and collaboration between Silicon Valley and Washington. In this, our first publication from the project, we report the results of an exploratory study into key issues of shared concern and ways to promote better dialog, based on personal interviews and an online survey of subject matter experts, policy leaders, academics, technology executives, and consultants.
The report was written by Loren DeJonge Schulman, Alexandra Sander, and Madeline Christian and includes a detailed explanation of our methodology, findings, and future plans — as well as our six key lessons for success in building collaboration between the government and the technology industry.
The full report is available as a PDF and embedded below.
Finland is a homogeneous population of about 5.5 million people, geographically isolated from the rest of the world. The vast majority of Finns share a common heritage, and they also seem largely willing to participate in clinical health studies. Three out of four Finns will agree to be a research subject, and thankfully, access to their clinical records is relatively easy, for both domestic researchers and foreign scientific collaborators. After thousands of years of isolation, Finns have become a relatively uniform population, genetically speaking. Additionally, the genealogies of Finns trace back numerous generations and hundreds of years, providing plenty of correlated genetic information and an excellent source of scientific data to study.
This case study examines the impact of Finland’s unique genetic resources, and its implications for global biotech policy.
The entertainment industries have led a worldwide campaign to ratchet up “anti-piracy” laws — but have they been effective in either reducing piracy or increasing revenue? Recently, there have been some very positive signs for those industries, while people have been signing up for popular authorized services. These two factors raise a serious question: is the success caused by the innovation or the legal changes? Is it the carrot or the stick that is leading us into this new world?
Read the full report below, or check out some of the key findings [pdf].
The basis of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century was the reliance on physical machinery to dramatically increase the productivity of industries ranging from textiles to transportation. The development of autonomous machines that can learn, recognize patterns and make complex decisions marks the next phase of automation. Cognitive computing applies software solutions to tasks that could not ordinarily be accomplished without human intervention. Applications range from driverless cars, face recognition algorithms, and natural language processing to data mining and algorithmic high-frequency trading. The global market for smart machines is already a multi-billion dollar industry that is expected to grow by double digits over the next few years. The automation of knowledge-based work will have broad effects on society, increasing economic productivity and providing a cornucopia of wealth.
This case study examines the impact of advanced cognitive computing on society, science, policy, ethics and more.
Biotechnology, as all sciences, advances step by step and builds on fortuitous and often serendipitous discoveries. In 1951, a woman named Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and a sample of her cancerous tissue cells were taken — without her knowledge or consent — and grown in a petri dish. For decades prior, scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive under laboratory conditions without success, but the tumor cells taken from Henrietta Lacks exhibited a remarkable ability to grow and thrive. These HeLa cells became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory. Since 2001, five Nobel prizes have been awarded based on research performed with HeLa cells. Trillions of HeLa cells have been bought and sold and used in medical studies all over the world, and they continue to contribute to the advancement of medicine and biology.
This case study examined the history and impact of HeLa cells and their unique policy implications.