Faculty Publications: Moving Beyond Intellectual Property Internalism

In The Cost of Price: Why and How to Get Beyond Intellectual Property Internalism, Professor Amy Kapczynski challenges readers to question the accepted wisdom that employing exclusive rights to govern the production and distribution of information is the most efficient model and therefore categorically superior to other means of information production.

Thinking externally - that is, looking beyond efficiency to fundamental values like privacy and distributive justice -- would better inform institutional choices between overlooked modes of scientific and cultural production. When considering these fundamental values, government procurement and commons-based production emerge as attractive alternatives to the primacy of exclusive rights and IP, and may be no less efficient.

Further Reading:

Kenneth J. Arrow, Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention, in The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (Richard Nelson ed., 1962);

Harold Desetz, Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint, 12 J.L. & Econ. 1 (1969);

Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008); 

Yochai Benkler, Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information, 52 Duke L.J. 1245 (2003);

Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann & Katherine J. Strandburg, Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment, 95 Cornell L. Rev. 657 (2010);

Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Distributive Values in Copyright, 83 Tex. L. Rev. 1535 (2005);

Margaret Chon, Intellectual Property and the Development Divide, 27 Cardozo L. Rev. 2821 (2006);

Julie E. Cohen, Copyright and the Jurisprudence of Self-Help, 13 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1089 (1998);

Sonia K. Katyal, Privacy v. Piracy, 7 Yale J.L. & Tech. 222 (2004-2005)