Creativity Without Law: Challenging the Assumptions of Intellectual Property

Patents and copyrights in American law are predicated on a utilitarian bargain: the law gives exclusive rights to creators in order to spur them to be productive and allow the public to benefit from the things they make. The corporate copyright interests continue to demand more and more exclusive rights at the expense of the public, claiming that only stronger protections for owners can ensure that new works are created. For example, even though dress designs are not protected in law, we get changing fashions constantly, yet the industry argues for expanding copyright law. This collection of essays by academics—mostly law professors—edited by Darling (research specialist, MIT Media Lab) and Perzanowski (law, Case Western Reserve Univ. Sch. of Law; coauthor, The End of Ownership) challenges the assumption that legal protections are needed to spur creativity. Each essay is an empirical look at several industries and how they respond to the lack of legal protections; e.g., recipes cannot be copyrighted, so chefs use peer pressure against unattributed copying.