The Public Perception of Intellectual Property

Though the success of intellectual property law depends upon its ability to affect human perception and behavior, the public psychology of intellectual property has barely been explored. Over 1,700 U.S. adults took part in an experimental study designed to investigate popular conceptions of intellectual property rights. Respondents’ views of what intellectual property rights ought to be differed substantially from what intellectual property law actually provides, and popular conceptions of the basis for intellectual property rights were contrary to commonly accepted bases relied upon in legal and policy decision-making. Linear regression analysis reveals previously unrecognized cultural divides concerning intellectual property law based upon respondents’ income, age, education, political ideology, and gender

Gaps, Inexperience, Inconsistencies, and Overlaps: Crisis in the Regulation of Genetically Modified Plants and Animals

The regulation of genetically modified products pursuant to statutes enacted decades prior to the advent of biotechnology has created a regulatory system that is passive rather than proactive about risks, has difficulty adapting to biotechnology advances, and is highly fractured and inefficient-transgenic plants and animals are governed by at least twelve different statutes and five different agencies or services. The deficiencies resulting from this piecemeal approach to regulation unnecessarily expose society and the environment to adverse risks of biotechnology and introduce numerous inefficiencies into the regulatory system. These risks and inefficiencies include gaps in regulation, duplicative and inconsistent regulation, unnecessary regulatory expense, agencies acting outside their areas of expertise, and unnecessary increases in the cost of and delay in the development and commercialization of new biotechnology products. These deficiencies also increase the risk of further unnecessary biotechnology scares, which may cause public overreaction against biotechnology products, preventing the maximization of social welfare. With science and society poised to soar from first-generation biotechnology (focused on crops modified for agricultural benefit), to next-generation developments (including transgenic fish, insects, and livestock, and pharmaceutical-producing and industrial compound-producing plants and animals), it is necessary to establish a comprehensive, efficient, and scientifically rigorous regulatory system. This Article details how to achieve such a result through fixing the deficiencies in, and risks created by, the current regulatory structure. Ignoring many details, the solutions can be summarized in two categories. First, statutory and regulatory gaps that are identified must be closed with new legislation and regulation. Second, regulation of genetically modified products must be shifted from a haphazard model based on statutes not intended to cover biotechnology to a system based upon agency expertise in handling particular types of risks

The Public Perception of Intellectual Property

Though the success of intellectual property law depends upon its ability to affect human perception and behavior, the public psychology of intellectual property has barely been explored. Over 1,700 U.S. adults took part in an experimental study designed to investigate popular conceptions of intellectual property rights. Respondents’ views of what intellectual property rights ought to be differed substantially from what intellectual property law actually provides, and popular conceptions of the basis for intellectual property rights were contrary to commonly accepted bases relied upon in legal and policy decision-making. Linear regression analysis reveals previously unrecognized cultural divides concerning intellectual property law based upon respondents’ income, age, education, political ideology, and gender

Technology Wars: The Failure of Democratic Discourse

Conflicts over the use and regulation of various technologies pervade public discourse and have dramatic implications for the public interest. Controversies over the regulation of genetically modified products, nuclear power, and nanotechnology, among others, provoke some of the most socially and politically volatile debates of our time. These technology conflicts extract a substantial price from society--they create costly inefficiencies, prevent society from optimally managing new technologies, consume vast resources, and retard technological growth. This Article develops a framework for understanding technology controversies, and consequently proposes new means for resolving or ameliorating a variety of seemingly intractable legal and regulatory standoffs. These teachings have potentially far-reaching consequences for conflict resolution in non-technology areas as well

Innovation Rewards: Towards Solving the Twin Market Failures of Public Goods

The challenge of achieving socially optimal incentives for innovation in public goods faces twin market failures: a market failure to adequately promote public goods invention and a market failure to implement innovative public goods once developed. Though innovation in private goods sometimes faces the former hurdle, often ameliorated by intellectual property law, the interaction of both market failures for public goods innovation raises unique difficulties. Environmentally beneficial technology presents an illustration of the innovation problem for public goods. Private actors lack sufficient incentives both to engage in environmentally beneficial innovation and to implement such innovation. While traditional intellectual property law and environmental law fail to cure the interaction of these public goods market failures, an innovation rewards system could produce more socially appropriate incentives. Using environmentally beneficial innovation as an example, this Article introduces a new framework for an innovation rewards system for public goods and discusses its implementation and potential advantages

To Promote the Creative Process: Intellectual Property Law and the Psychology of Creativity

The article discusses creativity under intellectual property (IP) law in the U.S. and the U.S. Constitution. The author examines Article I of the U.S. Constitution which was the basis for the U.S. Congress\u27 enactment of copyright and patent laws. He argues that large-scale collaborative projects are very common in the 21st century and are found in government, private, and university research markets

Proxy Signals: Capturing Private Information for Public Benefit

This Article presents an original empirical methodology to identify which patent laws will best promote optimal incentives to innovate for society. Vociferous debates over patent reform pit the United States’ largest innovation industries against each other in a dispute concerning whether stronger or weaker patent rights are necessary to promote innovation. Past efforts to answer this question have been thwarted by an inability to parse the impossibly complex social and legal relationship between innovation and patent law. Rather than considering such problems directly, the proxy technique introduced here offers a new framework to leverage indirect signals that capture better information than previously available concerning how best to promote incentives to innovate. In certain contexts, it is possible to use empirical information about the trade-off between the incentives and exclusivity costs of patent law to identify particular private industries that (1) face trade-offs equivalent to those that society faces, and (2) possess far superior information concerning how best to balance such trade-offs. Where industries satisfy both criteria, their private preferences will happen to align with social innovation objectives and can be mined for previously untapped, socially beneficial information. The proxy signal approach provides a new public choice methodology, designed to leverage the strength of collective private industry and market knowledge, in a manner that can be applied to other legal domains beyond patent law