Carroll, Michael W. --- "A Framework for Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights" [2011] ELECD 444; in Kur, Annette; Mizaras, Vytautas (eds), "The Structure of Intellectual Property Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: The Structure of Intellectual Property Law

Editor(s): Kur, Annette; Mizaras, Vytautas

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848448766

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: A Framework for Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights

Author(s): Carroll, Michael W.

Number of pages: 25

Extract:

2. A framework for tailoring
intellectual property rights
Michael W. Carroll*

1. INTRODUCTION

The literature concerning intellectual property rights has grown consider-
ably in the past few decades, reflecting the growing importance of patents
and copyrights as components of national and international trade regu-
lation as well as domestic innovation and cultural policy. Nonetheless,
two large questions require further attention. First, when and why grant
intellectual property rights? From the economic perspective, granting
exclusive rights is only one of a number of options available to stimulate
investments in innovation and cultural production. There is no generally
accepted framework for assessing the trade-offs between granting intellec-
tual property rights, investing public funds directly in innovation through
grants or prizes or indirectly through tax policy, or some combination of
these to encourage desired levels of inventive and creative activity.1
Second, why grant patents and copyrights as usually one-size-fits-all
bundles of rights? Theoretically, it would be better to tailor intellectual
property rights to reduce the social costs imposed by one-size-fits-all
patents and copyrights ­ uniformity cost. This is not to say that tailoring
intellectual property rights well is easily done. On the contrary, the practi-
cal obstacles are substantial, and it is for this reason that the conceptual
frames of unitary patent and copyright systems dominate the literature.
But intellectual property rights have been tailored before, and they will be
tailored again. It is time to have a framework for analyzing this activity


* Director, Program on ...