Members of the IP community – including inventors, content creators, bigtech managers, lawyers and educators – do not agree on some of the most basic fundamentals for intellectual property, including whether IP rights encourage sharing.
The findings can be found in a survey commissioned by the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding (CIPU) a nonpartisan non-profit and conducted by a leading market research firm.
As reported in IPWatchdog, the survey, Intellectual Property Principles: What the IP Community Regards as Important, “provides viewpoints within the intellectual property community about acceptable behaviors surrounding IP rights, as well as guiding IP principles for business and consumers.”
Responses from inventors, attorneys and consultants across the IP sector revealed a significant disparity in beliefs on how IP protections impact sharing and the effects of IP infringement, though most agreed that IP has positive economic impacts in general.
Value for Whom?
While most respondents agreed with the premise that an invention or expressive work can have economic value, there was greater doubt as to whether current forms of IP protections created value for society as a whole. While 97% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed about the value of inventions or expressive works, only 73% of respondents strongly agreed that copyrights have a positive impact on creative expression. Further, only 71% of respondents strongly agreed that patents had a positive impact on innovation.
Views among members of the IP community were more fractured on topics related to IP infringement. Fourteen percent of respondents were either neutral or disagreed with the premise that IP infringement hurts people. Only 56% of respondents strongly agreed that IP infringement has been linked to criminal activity and unfair competition.
The greatest amount of disagreement was spurred by statements that IP is property just like real property (14%) and that IP protections encourage sharing (16%).
Go here for the executive summary, here for the slides and the findings report. The research was conducted by Response: AI, a nationally recognized market research firm.
Go here for the IPWatchdog story.
Image source: CIPU; understandingip.org
ipcloseup.com 