IPR’s private property rights ensure no new good innovation – technology outpaces it and only communal understandings of IPR can ensure good innovation

Jessica Silbey, “Against Progress”, Stanford University Press, Pages 16-17, 7 June 2022

Uncertainty over the meaning of “progress” is one source of destabilizing tension. Technological advances occur at a rapid pace, while wealth inequality and political divisiveness related to these technological resources appear to be at unprecedented levels without foreseeable amelioration.16 Against Progress explores this tension by attending to intellectual property disputes in court and in everyday life in such a way that calls into question the shifting meaning of “progress of science and useful arts” in the age of digital reproduction and rapid technological change.17 Rather than focusing on the nature of inventorship, authorship, and commercial incentives, which are typical intellectual property concerns, I focus on how disputes about intellectual property revolve around more basic fundamental values. In a world rich with technology but facing rising global political instability and looming ecological disaster, this book sets aside conventional accounts of intellectual property’s justification and reimagines progress of science and the useful arts for the Anthropocene. Fundamental values like equality, privacy, and distributive justice are central to human flourishing and human dignity but have been largely absent from intellectual property law and policy. The book frames current intellectual property law and its role in everyday life as about these values and their contested contours as a bellwether of changing social justice needs in the Digital Age.

The old story is that copyright and patents promote the progress of science and the useful arts by granting to authors and inventors, for a limited time, a property right in the work made. This story explains that to encourage the work of intellectual labor, which is easily copied and resold (think a song or an invention), an author or inventor needs exclusive control over the work to recuperate the economic investment that produced it. Without property-like rights, the story goes, the progress of science and useful arts will slow if not stop altogether. This is the “grand incentive narrative” justifying intellectual property laws. This story requires revision in the Digital Age.18

Maturing conversations about the roles that creativity and innovation play in flourishing economies, in communities, and with everyday labor reveal that exclusive property rights may degrade rather than develop community sustainability. Technological progress and ubiquitous internet networks have not fostered or equitably spread general welfare or strengthened democratic governance, although they have enabled more copying and sharing and more iterative, derivative, and radical transformations of expressive and inventive work through those networks. These pioneering Digital Age behaviors are not rooted in exclusivity as much as in a newly imagined commons or a revised notion of the public sphere. In other words, private property rights are old news. Instead, values promoting social well-being and democratic politics such as equality and fairness structure relationships that foment creativity and innovation. The new story is that twenty-first-century creativity and innovation are developed through both human and digital networks bound together by evolving relations of mutual interdependence, all of which is reconfiguring twentieth-century society and politics for our internet age. Democratic and fundamental human values today—equality, privacy, distributive justice, and institutional accountability—orient disputes and practices concerning authorship, inventorship, and intellectual property generally, which is a departure from twentieth-century intellectual property justifications. Tracing intellectual property’s contested place in the Digital Age, Against Progress uncovers new accounts of intellectual property and pivotal shifts in a legal regime that promises progress of science and the useful arts in a society more technologically advanced than ever but struggling with destabilizing wealth disparities, uncertain political institutions, and ideological division.19 By studying everyday creative and innovative practices and contemporary intellectual property disputes, the book explores these new theories of “progress” for the internet age.