Author Archive | Prof. Christopher Sprigman (Virginia), guest-blogging

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, [...]

In our last post, we discussed a variety of industries in which we see creativity without much resort to patent or copyright law. And we offered some explanations for how low-IP creativity works, such as informal social norms and first mover advantage. In today’s post, we look at a couple of additional ways in which low-IP industries sustain creativity without heavy reliance on IP.  One has to do with the difference between product and performance.  The other relates to the surprising power of brands.

To see our first point, think about innovation in the world of cuisine. Recipes are widely copied – a fact you can confirm by looking at websites like RecipeSource and Cooks.com, which contain thousands of recipes that people have posted, many taken from cookbooks and cooking magazines. And recipes, for reasons we explained earlier, are not covered by copyright. And yet there are a lot of new recipes – cooks continue to innovate in this area despite others’ freedom to copy. Why? Well, on important reason is that the culinary industry doesn’t really rely very much on the recipe as a product. It relies, rather, on revenues from things that are harder to copy. Like restaurants. The quality of a recipe’s preparation in a great restaurant, the wonderful ambiance, the service, the entire experience of fine dining – these are all very difficult and expensive to copy. Any local sushi place can offer a miso-glazed black cod. But have you had the original at Nobu Matsuhisa’s signature “Matsuhisa” restaurant? Oh boy.

The strategy of sustaining innovation by shifting emphasis from product to performance is not confined to cuisine. The music industry – which has traditionally relied heavily on copyright law but is having an increasingly difficult time sustaining a copyright-centered business model – is [...]

In our first two posts, we wrote a bit about how two important creative industries, fashion and cuisine, do very well without much intellectual property.  Notice that we wrote “without much” IP, and not “without any”.  That’s because there is some IP that’s relevant to both. The fashion industry makes heavy use of trademark law to protect brands.  But the actual appearance of clothes – the fashion design – is almost entirely unprotected. In cuisine IP plays a similarly peripheral role. A recipe cannot be protected. The narrative that goes along with it may be, but the recipe can certainly be copied without the narrative.

So both fashion and cuisine are low-IP industries, and both are intensely creative even though others are free to copy and often do.  And as we describe in The Knockoff Economy, there are a lot of other industries that don’t rely much on IP law to motivate creativity.  We spend the first four chapters of the book taking a close look at these industries, and noting the many different ways in which they work to allow creativity to co-exist with copying — or, in some cases, even use copying as fuel for creativity.  The stories in these industries are all different, but they do fall into a few broad categories.

First, there are some that rely on informal rules against copying – “IP norms” instead of IP law.  Stand-up comedy is one of these.  In our chapter on comedy, we draw on earlier work that one of us (Sprigman) did with his University of Virginia colleague Dotan Oliar that documented stand-up comedians’ anti-copying norms and described how the stand-up community runs an informal but pretty effective community policing system to restrain copying.  Chefs, we show, have some similar copying norms, though these norms [...]