Intellectual Property

The Law and Economics Approach

Bibliographic Data

ID4028877
AuthorsRichard A Posner (Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Senior Lecturer, University of Chicago Law School, both in Chicago, Illinois., corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume19
Issue2
Pages57-73
Publication date2005-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Economic Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0895-3309 • E-ISSN: 1944-7965
PublisherAmerican Economic Association (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1257/0895330054048704
OpenAlexW1966454382
LanguageEN
Citations received20
References cited11

T he traditional focus of economic analysis of intellectual property has beenon reconciling incentives for producing such property with concernsabout restricting access to it by granting exclusive rights in intellectual goods—that is, by “propertizing ” them—thus enabling the owner to charge a price for access that exceeds marginal cost. For example, patentability provides an additional incentive to produce inventions, but requiring that the information in patents be published and that patents expire after a certain time limit the ability of the patentee to restrict access to the invention—and so a balance is struck. Is it an optimal balance? This question, and the broader issue of trading off incentive and access considerations, has proved intractable at the level of abstract analysis. With the rise of the law and economics movement, the focus of economic analysis of intellectual property has begun to shift to more concrete and manage-able issues concerning the structure and texture of the complicated pattern of common law and statutory doctrines, legal institutions and business practices relating to intellectual property. Among the issues discussed in this paper are the length of protection for intellectual property, the rules that allow considerable copying of intellectual property without permission of the originator, the rules governing derivative works, and alternative methods of providing incentives for the creation of intellectual property. The emphasis is on copyright law, which, perhaps because of its complex legal structure and the relative neglect by economists of the arts and entertainment, has tended to be slighted in the conventional economic analysis of intellectual property, relative to patent law, where economic analysis can draw on an extensive literature concerning the economics of innovation. I also

Economics · Intellectual property · Law and economics · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Copyright and Intellectual Property · Innovation Policy and RD · Intellectual Property and Patents · Law · Philosophy

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