Patents and Copyrights: Do the Benefits Exceed the Costs?

Patents and copyrights are forms of immaterial “property” that grant to their owners exclusive control over the production and sale of a specified product—a literary or artistic work in the case of copyrights, an invention or productive process in the case of patents. Though these concepts are subsumed under the broader heading of “intellectual property,” they are not completely analogous and cannot always be justified with the same arguments.

Volume 15, Number 4 (2001)