Young voters prefer weaker IP rights.
Mandel 14 [Gregory N. Mandel, Provost of Temple University and Laura H. Carnell Professor of Law at Temple Law School. Prior to serving as Provost, he was Dean of Temple’s Beasley School of Law for five years. Provost Mandel is a leading international scholar on intellectual property law, innovation, and the interface among technology and law. His publications have been selected as among the best intellectual property and patent law articles of the year three times. His article Patently Non-Obvious was identified as one of the most cited patent law articles of the past decade, and his experimental studies have been cited by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and in briefs filed before the United States Supreme Court. “The Public Perception of Intellectual Property,” Florida Law Review, Vol. 66, Is. 1, (2014). https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1178&context=flr]
Some of the most important findings from this study concerned individuals’ divergence of opinion on preferences for the strength of intellectual property rights. As reported above, being older, having lower income, being more educated, and having less intellectual property experience all correlate with a preference for stronger intellectual property protection. Figure 6 displays these effects graphically. This differentiation has important implications for several ongoing intellectual property debates.
The finding that younger people prefer weaker intellectual property rights is consistent with past studies that have found similar results when examining attitudes toward file sharing on the Internet.145 There does appear to be a generational divide concerning intellectual property protection. Interesting, here, is that most past research has focused on individual attitudes towards copyright protection, primarily in the context of the Internet, while the present study finds an age effect for the full population, across the patent and copyright conditions. This study appears to be the first to indicate that the generational divide concerning intellectual property rights cuts across intellectual property domains.