First, many thanks to Eugene and the rest of the VC team for inviting us to guest-blog this week.
The Knockoff Economy is about copying, and specifically about how copying, copyright, and creativity mix in a set of somewhat unusual industries—from fashion to food to football. Though our main focus is copyright, we also talk a bit about patent and other forms of intellectual property (IP).
As most VC readers know well, the American system of IP is not aimed at fairness or generally grounded in moral rights. It is a government intervention into the market aimed at precluding some forms of competition—those based on copying other innovations. Competition via copying is barred (or severely limited) as a way of ensuring that originators have a strong incentive to innovate in the first place.
We should say up front that we generally agree with this approach. We think that IP laws are necessary. The interesting and important question is how much IP protection is necessary to spur creativity and innovation.
In some cases, we argue, the answer is very little. And that has big implications for our IP policy, which has tended, over the last 200 years, to get ever-stricter and broader.

Now, savvy readers will recognize that law professors (especially liberals like us) criticizing IP law is right up there with dog-bites-man as a news story. What we do in the Knockoff Economy that is different is that we approach this issue in, what we believe, is a novel way.
Rather than look at how, say, copyright works (or doesn’t) in the publishing or film industries, we look at creative industries where there is no copyright protection, or where that protection is, for practical reasons, not used. And what we find is that in many of these industries, creativity [...]