This is our last post guest-blogging at the VC and we again want to thank our hosts. A lot of interesting comments came in, and we’ll use this final post to address some of the issues and questions raised by readers. In no particular order:
Innovation vs. Variation. A few comments argued that a lot of what we discuss in The Knockoff Economy—such as innovation in font design, fashion, or food—is not really innovation but rather than variation, and as such these cases shouldn’t be used to draw any larger conclusions about IP policy or the nature of creative incentives. So, for example, one commentator claimed that “true innovation is game-changing.”
Our own view is that this misconceives what actually happens in the world, and also is inconsistent with the way our legal system treats innovation and creativity. In The Knockoff Economy we stress the importance of “tweaking” over “pioneering,” because we believe that in fact a lot of great innovations, even those thought to be pioneering, are really built on existing advances. A great example is one Mark Lemley has written about: Thomas Edison and the lightbulb. Edison is popularly valorized as a great pioneer, but Mark notes that there were no fewer than a dozen lightbulbs already. Edison’s great contribution was to “f[ind] a bamboo fiber that worked as a filament in the lightbulb developed by Sawyer and Mann, who in turn built on lighting work done by others.” One could say the same about Steve Jobs, whom Malcolm Gladwell recently called “the greatest tweaker of his generation.”
Of course, innovation can be game-changing, but most of the time it’s really just improving the same game, not replacing it. And our IP system, both patent and copyright, apply to both sorts of innovation. In fact, [...]