Techdirt Reading List: The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation
We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.
This week, we've got the wonderful book The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation by law professors Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman. We have written about the book before and have even hosted some excerpts from the book, but it's a really great and important read. We mentioned it earlier this week in our story about the attempts to lock up pot with intellectual property protections -- because that story reflected much of what's in the Knockoff Economy.
The key point of the book is to highlight that the very premise behind many calls for intellectual property protection doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. Defenders of the system usually insist that copyrights and patents are necessary for creating the incentives to create or to innovate in a market. Yet, Raustiala and Sprigman carefully detail a bunch of different industries that don't have intellectual property protection, and over and over again, they see the same thing: more competition and more innovation, rather than less. For many years, we've highlighted the fact that it is frequently competition that drives innovation, yet so much of our public policy is based on the fallacy that it's monopoly rights that drive innovation. Thus, the Knockoff Economy is a really useful work in highlighting that perhaps the very premise that so much intellectual property protection is based on is wrong.
That's not to say, necessarily, that copyrights or patents have no place (though I know some of you do believe that) at all in modern society. But, at the very least, we should be looking at what is the actual impact of those laws, and are they really increasing innovation or doing something else entirely.
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This week, we've got the wonderful book The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation by law professors Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman. We have written about the book before and have even hosted some excerpts from the book, but it's a really great and important read. We mentioned it earlier this week in our story about the attempts to lock up pot with intellectual property protections -- because that story reflected much of what's in the Knockoff Economy.
The key point of the book is to highlight that the very premise behind many calls for intellectual property protection doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. Defenders of the system usually insist that copyrights and patents are necessary for creating the incentives to create or to innovate in a market. Yet, Raustiala and Sprigman carefully detail a bunch of different industries that don't have intellectual property protection, and over and over again, they see the same thing: more competition and more innovation, rather than less. For many years, we've highlighted the fact that it is frequently competition that drives innovation, yet so much of our public policy is based on the fallacy that it's monopoly rights that drive innovation. Thus, the Knockoff Economy is a really useful work in highlighting that perhaps the very premise that so much intellectual property protection is based on is wrong.
That's not to say, necessarily, that copyrights or patents have no place (though I know some of you do believe that) at all in modern society. But, at the very least, we should be looking at what is the actual impact of those laws, and are they really increasing innovation or doing something else entirely.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story