Experimental Tests of Intellectual Property Laws' Creativity Thresholds

• Published in: Texas law review 2014-06, Vol.92 (7), p.1921
• Main Authors: Buccafusco, Christopher, Burns, Zachary C, Fromer, Jeanne C, Sprigman, Christopher Jon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Copyright; Creativity; Employees; Experiments; Incentives; Innovations; Intellectual property; Inventions; Inventors; Patent law
• ISSN: 0040-4411; 1942-857X

In the US, intellectual property (IP) law is intended to encourage the production of new creative works and inventions. Copyright and patent laws do this by providing qualifying authors and inventors with a bundle of exclusive rights relating to the use and development of their creations. Importantly, however, these fields differ greatly in the ways that they determine whether some new creation is sufficiently innovative to merit legal protection. Copyright law sets the creativity bar especially low for new works of authorship, whereas patent law demands that a putative inventor prove that her creation is highly innovative. In the series of experiments reported in this Article, the authors extend the research on the effects of incentives for creativity into the realm of intellectual property. Specifically, they test whether the existence of a creativity threshold that conditions entry into a prize lottery on meeting certain performance standards affects how creative people are.