VII WW on Economics and Philosophy (2007)

Do patents promote innovation? And copyright creativity?

A workshop organized by the the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation at the
Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia
Madrid, 21-22 May 2007

Director: Michele Boldrin (WUStL)

Coordinators: Jesus Zamora & David Teira (UNED)

Preliminary list of speakers

Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine, Stan Liebowitz, Ramon Marimon, Douglass
North, Richard Stallman, Edward Valauskas

Call for papers

(Deadline: Feb 28th 2007 | Acceptance: March 15th 2007)

Is copyright a good idea? How about patents? From an economic perspective,
it is copies of works that matter, and not abstract ideas. Copies of works
are property in the ordinary sense, and are protected by ordinary laws
against theft. Patents and copyright, then, do not grant property rights,
but rather a monopoly over all copies of the original work

On the one hand, it is important to recognize that creating a new
commodity or production process, a new book or a new medicine, requires
producing a large indivisible unit, and because of this indivisibility,
the ordinary functioning of the market may not provide adequate
incentives. There is a large fixed cost, and a small marginal cost of
making copies: if copies are sold at the marginal cost, the fixed cost
will never be recouped. On the other hand, it is important to recognize
that the creator has a "first mover" advantage in profiting from his
creation, that capacity is limited and imitation is never costlessly. The
creator is the only owner of the first copy and of the initial productive
capacity: he/she has opportunities to profit before imitation takes place.

There is a conflict here, a conflict due to a profoundly different
conceptualization of property, and of how the economic system works or
should work with respect to innovation and creativity. But there is also a
different assessment of the available data: do we obtain more useful
medicines with a patent regime than without? How about books and software
when copyright is available? What's the historical evidence? What's the
cross-country and cross-regimes evidence? A consensus is far from being
reached; in the meanwhile laws are passed, cases are brought to court,
judges rule, international treaties are written, and the intellectual
debate rages on.

Is this conflict resolvable by rational discourse and empirical evidence?
Are there only mutually incompatible models, or is there a middle ground
both sides can accept? Are we facing theft, when someone rejects patents
or copyright, or is it instead just economic competition at work?

Philosophical traditions, based, on natural law or utilitarian arguments,
conflict with each other, asserting one that "intellectual property" is a
well defined concept and right, and the other that it is nonsense and pure
exercise in rent-seeking and monopoly power. Legal scholars are equally
divided, especially when it comes to the social value, not to speak of the
legal coherence, or recent extensions of patents and copyright to areas of
economic endeavor where they had previously been totally absent. We are
sailing new waters, and we need a new map.

The goal of the conference is to provide a forum for furthering our
understanding of these areas of research through the presentation and
discussion of some of the best work produced around the world, and the
contribution of personal reflections by some of the main players in the
debate over patents and copyright. More precisely, the proposal is to
focus the conference on three sets of "subtopics" of the general issue as
just defined:

1. Patents, how they work in theory and in practice
2. Copyright, how it works in theory and in practice
3. Intellectual Property: is this a useful concept, from a legal,
philosophical and economic point of view?

Send a 1000 words abstract before Feb. 28th to Michele Boldrin (mboldrin
[at] artsci.wustl.edu). Acceptance will be notified by March 15th.

Further information: 
http://www.urrutiaelejalde.org/WinterWorkshop/2007.html


David Teira