ABSTRACT
What are the barriers to progress? For decades, IP scholars had an easy answer: suboptimal private investment in public goods. Recent work on the psychology and sociology of creativity, however, has exposed the descriptive limits of economically-oriented IP models. Simply put, the level of private investment does not dictate the ‘Progress of Science and useful Arts’. As a result, IP scholars need richer models of technological and cultural progress. This Article develops precisely such a model.
I begin with the premise that new ideas and artifacts depend on old ones. Drawing from social scientific research, I then model creativity as emerging from interactions among three components: (1) a domain of existing ideas and artifacts; (2) makers who rely on those existing ideas and artifacts to generate new ones; and (3) evaluators who assess a domain’s ideas and artifacts. The primary barrier to progress lies in whether makers can find the ideas and artifacts that lay the foundation for new ones. This ecosystem model of creativity yields powerful insights for IP scholars …
Sawicki, Andres, The Law of Creativity? (August 28, 2023), Cornell Law Review, Forthcoming; University of Miami Legal Studies Research Paper No 4626121.
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