All creativity and innovation build on existing ideas. Authors and inventors copy, adapt, improve, interpret, and refine the ideas that have come before them. The central task of intellectual property (IP) law is regulating this sequential innovation to ensure that initial creators and...

In this article we report on the results of an experiment we performed to determine whether transactions in intellectual property (IP) are subject to the valuation anomalies commonly referred to as “endowment effects”. Traditional conceptions of the value of IP rely on assumptions about...

Despite considerable research suggesting that creators value attribution – i.e., being named as the creator of a work – U.S. intellectual property (IP) law does not provide a right to attribution to the vast majority of creators. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, many European...

In the United States, intellectual property (IP) law is intended to encourage the production of new creative works and inventions. Copyright and patent laws do this by providing qualifying authors and inventors with a bundle of exclusive rights relating to the use and development of their...

The scope and enforcement of intellectual property (IP) laws are becoming salient, for the first time, to a wide cohort of U.S. and international communities. National and international legislation, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), and the...

The ultimate end of patent law must be to spur innovations that improve human welfare — innovations that make people better off. But firms will only invest resources in developing patentable inventions that will allow them to make money — that is, inventions that people will want to use and...

The international debate over copyright term extension for existing works turns on the validity of three empirical assertions about what happens to works when they fall into the public domain. Our study of the market for audio books and a related human subjects experiment suggest that all three...