Intellectual property rights, innovation in developing countries, and copyright team extension
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2004
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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This thesis explores the interrelationship between the intellectual property rights (IPRs) and technological changes. In unraveling the causality, it was found that the relationship between IPRs and technological changes is largely a mutually fostering one. On one hand, the IPRs help promote innovations. On the other hand, IPRs are institutions developed endogenously in response to the rapid technological changes. This interrelationship is manifest in copyrights and patents - industrialists argue that patents lead to more innovations by locking in competitive advantages for companies that take technological lead, while copyright becomes longer and stronger when new technologies facilitating faster distribution become easier to access. Each of these relationships is relegated to one chapter for detailed examination. In the first chapter, I extended Helpman (1993) model by incorporating the innovations in developing countries. As a result, I found both positive and negative effects depending on the relative population size and current rate of innovation, as opposed to Helpman's finding of negative effect only. The second chapter explores the next aspect of the relationship. A concept of cost of expression advanced by Landes and Posner in (1989) is one of the pillars of the model on copyright. I find that an optimal path over time should be a stronger copyright protection when new technologies are introduced followed by a relaxed protection after technologies stop to advance. Additionally, when experiencing the same technological shock, countries with lower works of authorship to begin with need to strengthen the copyright protection to a greater extension compared with the countries having more works of authorship. In Chapter Three, I conduct a case study on the US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) passed in 1998. In this study, the previously mentioned two issued are again addressed - the affect of copyright term extension on future creations, and the justification of extension due to technological changes. In this chapter, no adequate economic rationale for the extension was found. Although some of the factors are difficult to measure, it seems that the costs outweigh the benefits of the copyright term extension.
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Theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Economics; no. 4473
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