Saturday, May 30, 2015

IP in a World Without Scarcity

http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawReview-90-2-Lemley.pdf

Things are valuable because they are scarce. The more abundant they become, the

cheaper they become. But a series of technological changes is underway that

promises to end scarcity as we know it for a wide variety of goods. The Internet is

the most obvious example, because the change there is furthest along. The Internet

has reduced the cost of production and distribution of informational content effectively

to zero. More recently, new technologies promise to do for a variety of physical

goods and even services what the Internet has already done for information.

The role of intellectual property (IP) in such a world is both controverted and

critically important. Efforts to use IP to lock down the Internet have so far failed to

stem the unauthorized distribution of content. But contrary to the predictions of IP

theory, the result of that failure has not been a decline in creativity. To the contrary,

creativity is flourishing on the Internet as never before despite the absence of effective

IP enforcement. That is a problem for IP theory, which may not be the main

driver of creativity in a world where creation, reproduction, and distribution are

cheap. That is increasingly the world in which we will live.
 
 

No comments:

Post a Comment

If you have a comment regarding the post above, please feel free to leave it here.