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Paul J. Heald, professor of law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, discusses his new book “Do Bad Things Happen When Works Enter the Public Domain? Empirical Tests of Copyright Term Extension.”

The international debate over copyright term extension for existing works turns on the validity of three empirical assertions about what happens to works when they fall into the public domain. Heald discusses a study he carried out with Christopher Buccafusco that found that all three assertions are suspect. In the study, they show that audio books made from public domain bestsellers are significantly more available than those made from copyrighted bestsellers. They also demonstrate that recordings of public domain and copyrighted books are of equal quality.