The justification for creating temporary monopolies through
patents and copyrights is that they encourage creative activity
that would not otherwise take place. But Raustiala and Sprigman
argue that imitation -- which music labels and movie studios
often consider theft -- frequently stimulates creativity rather
than discouraging it. In this engaging text, the authors draw on
the experience of many industries -- fashion, cuisine, finance,
and open-source software, among others -- to demonstrate that a
lack of effective copyright protection hardly throttles
innovation and in fact encourages it. They draw a distinction
between “pioneers,” who develop significant new designs or
formulations, and “tweakers,” who make incremental improvements
in new concepts and who would be inhibited if intellectual
property rules were more tightly drawn and enforced. Traditional
music labels have decried the copying of recorded music, arguing
that it discourages the composition and performance of new
music. According to the autho