Copyright and Intellectual Property

The United States and China are approaching a critical point in a dispute over China’s practices on intellectual property (IP)

This week’s chart shows the sharp increase in the number of patents over the past three decades, using data from the US Patent and Trademark Office to display the total number of patents that have been extended from 1900 to 2014.

Libertarians intuitively understand the case for patents: just as other property rights internalize the social benefits of improvements to land, automobile maintenance, or business investment, patents incentivize the creation of new inventions, which might otherwise be undersupplied.

In the past two years, a spate of misleading reports on intellectual property has sought to convince policymakers and the public that implausibly high proportions of US output and employment depend on expansive intellectual property (IP) rights. These reports provide no theoretical or empirical evidence to support such a claim, but instead simply assume that the existence of intellectual property in an industry creates the jobs in that industry.

Intellectual Privilege reveals copyright as a statutory privilege that threatens our natural and constitutional rights. From this fresh perspective comes fresh solutions to copyright’s problems.

In a study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “Video Marketplace Regulation: A Primer on the History of Television Regulation and Current Legislative Proposals,” scholars Adam Thierer and Brent Skorup review television distribution rules and regulations, their negative effects on the market, and the various proposals for reform. While most congressional proposals for reforming video regulation only address the symptoms of overregulation, or worse, propose to expand these regulations, some proposals take a more comprehensive approach to reforming the extensive regulatory regime for video distribution. Entrepreneurs and consumers would benefit from removing or reforming much of the current regulation of the video distribution market.

We mine two underexplored traditions for insights into intellectual property: the public choice or Virginia school, centered on James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and the Bloomington or Institutional Analysis and Development school, centered on Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. We apply the perspectives of each school to issues of intellectual property and develop new insights, questions, and focuses of attention. We also explore tensions and synergies between the two schools on issues of intellectual property.