Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory
Creativity is universally agreed to be a good that copyright law should seek to promote, yet copyright scholarship and policymaking have proceeded largely on the basis of assumptions about what [...]
Copyright Infringement in the Market for Digital Images
Digital technologies for sharing creative goods create new opportunities for copyright infringement and challenge established enforcement methods. We establish several important facts about the nature of copyright infringement and efforts [...]
Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Copyright infringement may result from frictions preventing legal consumption, but may also reveal demand. Motivated by this fact, we run a field experiment in which we contact firms that are [...]
Dematerialization, Pragmatism and the European Copyright Revolution
Over the last three centuries, a particular model of copyright law has evolved in the United Kingdom. Under this "dematerialised" model, the law’s attention is directed towards an immaterial, malleable [...]
Evaluating the Demsetzian Trend in Copyright Law
Copyright law provides an excellent case study with which to study and evaluate Harold Demsetz's theory of property rights. Regardless of how one feels about the relationship between property and [...]
Copyright and Innovation: The Untold Story
Copyright has an innovation problem. Judicial decisions, private enforcement, and public dialogue ignore innovation and overemphasize the harms of copyright infringement. Just to pick one example, “piracy,” “theft,” and “rogue [...]
Eight Market-Oriented Proposals That Reduce Income Inequality
Debates over economic policy are often framed as conservatives supporting market-oriented policies, while progressives support government interventions. However, there are many market-oriented policies that can lead to more equality, an [...]
Fashion’s Function in Intellectual Property Law
Clothing designs can be beautiful. But they are also functional. Fashion’s dual nature sits uneasily in intellectual property law, and its treatment by copyright, trademark, and design patent laws has [...]
Patents, Meet Napster: 3D Printing and the Digitization of Things
Digitization has reached things. This shift promises to alter the business and legal landscape for a range of industries. Digitization has already disrupted copyright-based industries and laws. As cost barriers [...]
To Promote the Creative Process: Intellectual Property Law and the Psychology of Creativity
Though a primary goal of intellectual property law is to promote creativity in technology and the arts, intellectual property doctrine pays remarkably little attention to psychology research on how to [...]