1AC claims linking intellectual property and innovation are epistemologically bankrupt

(Sasha, A feminist manifesto of resistance against intellectual property regimes: reclaiming the public domain as an open-access information commons, Critical African Studies, 13:1, 115-126, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1909881 )

Incentives and innovation IP defenders often make the claim that economic incentive is the key to creativity and innovation and that market mechanisms drive the ‘innovation engine’ (Johnson 2010, 247). However, neither history nor psychology bear this claim out. Pre-modern China, considered one of the most innovative civilizations in history, did not permit any ‘monopolistic rights of exploitation’ over an invention or work (Darch 2017, 44). Similarly, indigenous peoples have produced and stewarded vast vaults of artistic and scientific knowledge for centuries. As Vandana Shiva writes, IP offers distorted ideas of creativity, by denying the role of innovation in traditional systems– such as for instance, the role that farmers play in developing high-yielding, soil fertility-enhancing varieties of crops through traditional practices (Shiva 1999, 29). There is little empirical evidence of the claim that expanded IP regimes result in increased innovation. On the contrary, in the information domain in particular, patents tend to benefit rent-seekers while harming innovation and access to knowledge, owing to increasingly ‘combinatorial’ and ‘incremental’ patents forming ‘patent thickets’, which block the path to innovation (Aigrain 2010, 162). Copyright benefits– increasingly corporatized– are largely allocated amongst a complex web of publishers, distributors, producers, marketers, and advertisers, rather than artists or composers (Greene 2008). Callahan (2017a), musician and activist, likens the music industry to a plantation system, where recording artists are equivalent to sharecroppers and recording companies; the owners of channels of distribution and marketing, are the landlords who extract underpaid labour from artists in exchange for access to distribution (16). He points out that the American music industry was built on ‘slavery, Jim Crow and the perpetuation of racism’ (Callahan 2017a, 19). Conversely, Deborah Halbert documents that in the erstwhile Soviet Union a profusion of literary and artistic work was produced and circulated anonymously, outside state control (samizdat or ‘publishing house of oneself’) and was therefore accorded no protection (Halbert 2017). Emerging behavioural research suggests that monetary incentives do not offer a meaningful account of human motivation and that economic rewards share a more complicated relationship with different types of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation than once thought (Gneezy, Meier, and Rey-Biel 2011).