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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Moral Psychology Of Copyright Infringement, Christopher Buccafusco, David Fagundes
The Moral Psychology Of Copyright Infringement, Christopher Buccafusco, David Fagundes
Faculty Scholarship
Numerous recent cases illustrate that copyright owners sue for infringement even when an unauthorized use of their work causes them no economic harm. This presents a puzzle from the perspective of copyright theory as well as a serious social problem, since infringement suits designed to remedy non-economic harms tend to stifle rather than encourage creative production. While much scholarship has critiqued copyright’s economic theory from the perspective of authors’ incentives to create, ours is the first to explore this issue from the perspective of owners’ motivations to sue for infringement. We turn to moral psychology, and in particular to moral …
What's A Name Worth?: Experimental Tests Of The Value Of Attribution In Intellectual Property, Christopher Jon Sprigman, Christopher Buccafusco, Zachary C. Burns
What's A Name Worth?: Experimental Tests Of The Value Of Attribution In Intellectual Property, Christopher Jon Sprigman, Christopher Buccafusco, Zachary C. Burns
Faculty Scholarship
Despite considerable research suggesting that creators value attribution – i.e., being named as the creator of a work – U.S. intellectual property (IP) law does not provide a right to attribution to the vast majority of creators. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, many European countries give creators, at least in their copyright laws, much stronger rights to attribution. At first blush it may seem that the U.S. has gotten it wrong, and the Europeans have made a better policy choice in providing to creators a right that they value. But for reasons we will explain in this …
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment, Christopher Buccafusco, Christopher Sprigman
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment, Christopher Buccafusco, Christopher Sprigman
Faculty Scholarship
In this article we report on the results of an experiment we performed to determine whether transactions in intellectual property (IP) are subject to the valuation anomalies commonly referred to as “endowment effects”. Traditional conceptions of the value of IP rely on assumptions about human rationality derived from classical economics. The law assumes that when people make decisions about buying, selling, and licensing IP they do so with fixed, context-independent preferences. Over the past several decades, this rational actor model of classical economics has come under attack by behavioral data showing that people do not always make strictly rational decisions. …