The Vanishing Benefits of Fair Use : A Review of the Flynn-Palmedo Study on ‘User Rights’ in Copyright Law

In this paper I discuss serious flaws in a recently released study on copyright (“The User Rights Database: Measuring the Impact of Copyright Balance”) by American University Washington College of Law's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. Among other problems, the statistical results of the study are shown to be spurious correlations — the consequence of basic errors in both the design, construction and execution of the empirical analysis. I also replicate the analysis and show that the statistically significant relationships from the study vanish when standard methods replace the poorly specified and improperly estimated models