The Cost of Price: Why and How to Get Beyond Intellectual Property Internalism

The field of intellectual property (IP) law today is focused, as the name itself advertises, on one particular institutional approach to scientific and cultural production: IP. When legal scholars explain this focus, they typically do so with reference to the virtues of price. Because price gives th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inUCLA law review Vol. 59; no. 4; p. 970
Main Author Kapczynski, Amy
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law 01.04.2012
Subjects
Alternatives
Costs
Efficiency
Intellectual property
United States > US
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Summary:The field of intellectual property (IP) law today is focused, as the name itself advertises, on one particular institutional approach to scientific and cultural production: IP. When legal scholars explain this focus, they typically do so with reference to the virtues of price. Because price gives them a decentralized way to link social welfare to the production of information, IP is alleged to be more efficient than other approaches. But the internalism that characterizes the field of IP cannot be justified by the value of efficiency. Using price to guide scientific and cultural production -- which is to say, using IP -- may have costs not only for efficiency, but also for distributive justice and informational privacy. The IP approach is in tension with the value of information privacy because relying on price to generate information facilitates the desire, the demand, and perhaps the capacity for price discrimination.
ISSN:0041-5650
1943-1724