[WikiEN-l] Copyright impact on Wikipedia comprehensiveness

While copyright governs the distribution of creative content in industries like publishing and computer software, its impact on creative reuse has largely evaded empirical analysis. I use the digitization of both copyrighted and non-copyrighted issues of one publication, Baseball Digest, to measure the impact of copyright on a prominent venue for reuse: Wikipedia. While the overall impact of digitization on reuse is positive, copyright hurts both the extent of reuse and the level of internet traffic to affected Wikipedia pages. The impact of copyright is more pronounced for images compared to text and becomes economically significant only post-digitization.