Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2023
Publication Title
Washington University Law Review
Abstract
Intellectual property is understood to have an economic rationale: supplying incentives for innovation and for the creation and dissemination of knowledge and information. In the modern era, questions of how best to accomplish this have been explored with reference to economic efficiency and other concepts from microeconomics. But why not macroeconomics? In the microeconomic view, the intangibles of innovation, knowledge, and information are ordinary economic goods, albeit ones whose easy reproducibility leads to special problems. In the macroeconomic view, however, innovation, knowledge, and information are extraordinary goods with special virtues. Indeed, modern macroeconomics puts these intangibles at the center of the field because they are understood to be the key to achieving sustained economic growth in an advanced economy. And growth is macroeconomics’ principal contemporary concern. This Article makes a general case for putting macroeconomics front and center in discussions about intellectual property law, and it suggests a number of insights that come from doing so. The macroeconomic view can offer policy prescriptions that are distinct from and contrary to those springing from a microeconomic view. In particular, and perhaps counterintuitively, a macroeconomic focus cautions against expanding existing intellectual property rights or introducing new ones.
Volume
100
First Page
1139
Recommended Citation
Eric E. Johnson, The Macroeconomics Of Intellectual Property, 100 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1139 (2023).