Intellectual Property and Optimal Copyright Protection

This paper develops a simple model that allows to analyze the rationale for the protection of intellectual property and to derive the conditions that an optimal form of protection has to meet. It is shown that not only a reason for the limitation of intellectual property rights does exist, but that efficient copyright protection must also be above a minimum level of protection. Furthermore, it is argued that even optimum copyright protection will not produce a first best solution, such that there is room for a comparative institutional analysis of different institutional arrangements that address the basic problem of providing incentives for the production of information goods.