Check out Michele Boldrin’s and David Levine’s joint work on intellectual property if you are interested in such issues. For example, this abstract of their paper titled “The Case Against Intellectual Property”, puts it clearly:
Argues that the downstream licensing agreements implicit in current intellectual property law are anti-competitive and that there should be a presumption for intellectual goods as with other goods that competition is likely to outperform monopoly.
I’ll be interested to see how they handle the age-old argument of the tradeoff between the incentive to innovate and be creative, and the deadweight loss of monopoly rents that accompany such property rights. I vacillate between “patents are a government-granted monopoly” and “patents internalize optimal innovation incentives, but are fussy and fidgety and fall prey to the knowledge problem”, which means I’m not high on them by any extent.
Interesting …