Copyright as Property in the Post-Industrial Economy: A Research Agenda

Abstract:

"Everything we know about creativity suggests that copyright plays very little role in motivating creative work. In the  contemporary information society, the purpose of copyright is to enable the provision of capital and organization so that creative work may be exploited. This reframing has four important consequences for debates about copyright law and policy. First, abandoning the incentives-for-authors story requires us to develop a better understanding of how cultural progress emerges, and a more accurate account of how the economic incentives that copyright provides affect progress more generally. Second, an account of copyright as incentives for capital suggests a different approach to conceptualizing the kind of “property” that copyright represents. Copyright scholars habitually compare copyright to property in land, a conceptual move that passes over an important stage in the evolution of economic activity and  associated economic rights.

There are important benefits to be gained from comparing post-industrial, information property to industrial-era, corporate property, and copyright law more explicitly to corporate law. Specifically, copyright law in the post-industrial era works (or should work) to separate authorship from control of creative works so that a set of coordination problems closely associated with information resources can be solved. Third, comparing copyright more explicitly to corporate property suggests some different ways of thinking about problems of social welfare that so often bedevil regimes of property law. Fourth, comparing copyright more explicitly to corporate property foregrounds copyright law’s potential to
function as a tool for ensuring accountability to the authors without whom the copyright system could not function."