Economic Analysis of Nonpatent Intellectual Property Rights and Damages Measures
Elizabeth A. Evans, Peter P. Simon · 2012
This chapter discusses the protections that law provides to non-patent intellectual property rights such as copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, explaining the economic implications for each type and suggesting what an owner must do to obtain protection. Copyrights protect original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression. Despite the perception that the authors who use open-source arrangements give their works away condition-free, these authored works often have copyright protection against infringement. Copyrights provide a stronger form of protection than do patents because the author of a copyrighted novel controls all derivative uses of the work, such as translation into another language or quotes appearing on T-shirts or in calendars. Regarding independent duplication, patents provide more protection than do copyrights. Under the patent system, the winner takes all, whereas the author of a copyrighted work has no protection from an independent recreation of the author's work. This inconsistency has an economic rationale: the cost of checking for duplicates in the copyright system exceeds that for the patent system.