The Unseen Costs of Intellectual Property

Arguments in favor of intellectual property (IP) boil down to innovation. If not for giving company X a monopoly on producing good Y, good Y would have never been produced, and we would be worse off; therefore, the government should enforce intellectual “property.”

As persuasive as this may be to laymen, it has a hidden premise; IP provides us with new goods and no relevant cost. There is no sacrifice. The intellectual monopoly will indeed decrease production relative to the free market quantity, but if not for IP protection, there would be no free market quantity in the first place. IP protections are claimed to be a neutral policy; the underproduction relative to an unhampered market is acknowledged, but the market would allegedly not exist if not for the IP protection. It is a win-win!

Admittedly, this situation is conceivable, but the cost of the protection is not simply lower production relative to a competitive market and higher prices, but foregone investment into alternative production is a cost we have no knowledge of.

For example, it may be the case that developing the EpiPen would not happen in a society absent of IP protections; however, this is not a reason to support IP. The choice is not just between EpiPen and no EpiPen, it is between EpiPen and foregone alternative, the unseen.

In this example, if there had been no IP protections, the EpiPen would not have been developed, but the investors and producers would not have gone home and become couch potatoes! The capital invested in EpiPen would have been directed to some other productive endeavor, perhaps the development or production of another drug or in another industry entirely.

That is not something we should lament over. Producing more of another drug is certainly a good thing. If the capital is invested in another industry, it might enable the production of medical devices or food, both also potentially lifesaving.

Even if the alternative investment is not in a “lifesaving” industry, it would be a life-altering industry. All business in the free market aims at the satisfaction of consumer desires. Even if the capital goes into McDonalds or a video game company, the fact remains that this may be the next best alternative investment for the available capital.

Who can say that these investments are not worth it? McDonalds supplies food in foods deserts. Video game companies might produce a game that brings joy to the heart of a kid dying of cancer. Value is subjective. Certain investments will prove satisfying to some, while meaningless to others. The rate of return in terms of money is the only basis for comparing the ability of alternative investments to fulfill the individual desires.

Is all lost? Are we to give up innovation? No; there is plenty of literature explaining how innovation occurs in the absence of IP protections (Against Intellectual Property and Against Intellectual Monopoly).

Non-profits can innovate, too. If a group of people observe that the private sector is innovating inefficiently according to their preferences, they can form or fund a non-profit corporation that engages in research regardless of IP protections.

Furthermore, for-profit companies can take a lot of measures to make sure that their formulas are not copies, such as built-in obsolescence, un-replicability, and non-disclosure agreements.

These are only some ways that companies can protect their formulas. Who is to say that a company will not hire a team of scientists to innovate more in order to stay ahead of competitors? Are we to suspect that pharmaceutical companies will simply give up? Definitely not; they will just adopt a different business model.

There is no way to determine a priori how a company will alter innovation in the absence of IP. Some will not be affected, some will decrease innovation, and some will innovate more. The choice of potential innovators is not always between innovating or not innovating, it is between innovating here, innovating there, or going into some non-innovative yet productive endeavor.

To say that there is an underproduction of innovation at any point is to suggest that there is a better quantity of innovation that exceeds the quantity of innovation desired voluntarily by consumers. If consumers are willing and able to support a higher degree of innovation, someone will find a way to exploit that desire, thus, profiting. The claim states that there is an efficient level of innovation outside of what human actors have voluntarily demonstrated. Efficiency, determined by voluntary actions of human actors, is opposed to the IP.

Ultimately, many, many people are harmed in order to provide protection for someone else’s idea in excess of the free market quantity of protection. Such a thing harms consumers generally instead of enhancing their welfare. That alone is enough to be against IP.

Prioritizing one innovation over another is nothing short of arrogance. It neglects the unseen effects of government intervention and subverts the ability of the market to fulfill consumer desires. All action aims at the satisfaction of human affairs. Choosing not to innovate is a beneficial decision just like any other, and we should not make it a matter of public policy.

 


Benjamin Seevers is a student at Grove City College studying economics and philosophy. 

READER COMMENTS

john hare
Jun 17 2023 at 1:44pm

I think you are on target though I may not agree with you down the line 100%. I am an inventor that has never applied for a patent. The costs and risks of getting and protecting a patent seemed less rewarding than using that same effort on the next five things that I found of interest.

 

The most cautionary thing I know of supporting your thesis is the Wright brothers and airplanes. They were first in flight, and then tried to sew up the field and from some point spent most of their efforts in court instead of the technology that they pioneered. It is possible that net result was that they retarded aviation in this country to some degree. By 1918 when the US entered WW1, the Europeans were so far ahead that all US aviation units flew British and French aircraft.

 

I do reserve the right to disagree based on further information.

Benjamin Seevers
Jun 17 2023 at 7:33pm

Innovations that don’t require patents will be relatively less attractive under a framework of IP protection. It is interesting that you as an inventor experienced a similar dilemma to what I described even when IP protections exist. Thank you for sharing.

Dylan
Jun 17 2023 at 3:45pm

This was an excellent essay and well reasoned, particularly for someone that I assume is an undergraduate student.  I disagree with your conclusions, but I suspect that is largely a difference in values.

Prioritizing one innovation over another is nothing short of arrogance. It neglects the unseen effects of government intervention and subverts the ability of the market to fulfill consumer desires. All action aims at the satisfaction of human affairs. Choosing not to innovate is a beneficial decision just like any other, and we should not make it a matter of public policy.

I look at this as both a matter of philosophy but also as a matter of pragmatism.  On the philosophical side, I think government doesn’t have a choice to not prioritize one form of innovation over another, but I tend to fall on there isn’t a moral difference between causing something to happen and letting something happen through inaction.  That’s a whole can o’ worms though, and probably best to not get into unless it’s 2am in the dorms and we’ve got nothing better to talk about.

So, I’ll focus on the pragmatic side of things.  I think the strongest case from that end, which I think you implicitly accept based on your examples, is in the pharma area.  It’s also the area where I’m most familiar with R&D.  We also happen to have a nice comparison group for pharma drugs with the dietary supplement market.  Dietary supplements can be patented, but because of FDA restrictions against making health claims on labels that are not supported by evidence, patents in the supplements market are not easily enforceable.

Pharma will spend hundreds of millions minimum to test a drug to make sure it is safe and effective to take to market, such expenditure would be impossible to justify without patent protection.  It seems likely that if this protection went away, the pharma market would more closely resemble the supplements market which (to me at least) is not an improvement.  There are a lot of caveats and nuances to this, since every piece of healthcare is interlocking and making a change in one area will have cascading effects, and partially for that reason I would be very hesitant to make a change like this one without carefully understanding the repercussions as best as you can.

steve
Jun 18 2023 at 4:47pm

I think you make a good case. Consider when he says this.

“In this example, if there had been no IP protections, the EpiPen would not have been developed, but the investors and producers would not have gone home and become couch potatoes! The capital invested in EpiPen would have been directed to some other productive endeavor, perhaps the development or production of another drug or in another industry entirely.”

What would be the incentive to go spend $500 million developing a new drug instead of the EpiPen when it would have no protections? Someone in China or India could produce it without having to spend the development costs and at half the cost. It seems to me that in general a lack of IP would incentivize people to avoid any innovation with significant R&D or development costs. It’s just not that hard to backwards engineer most drugs or medical devices and also true in many other fields. (Mind you, I am not a true supporter of big pharma. I think their tricks to extend IP are pretty sleazy.)

The incentives for private companies to do basic research are already pretty iffy. I would think this would pretty much eliminate it. Also, when you look at the list of countries with strong vs weak IP, if weak IP spurs innovation and economic growth the  performance of the countries low on the scale doesnt seem to support that, granted there are other factors.

Steve

Mark Brady
Jun 17 2023 at 5:16pm

Good job, Benjamin!  I look forward to a serious discussion of what you have written.

I’m sure Benjamin is well aware of Arnold Plant’s seminal articles on intellectual property, but likely there are readers who are not.  Here is a link to his first article, “The Economic Theory Concerning Patents for Inventions,” Economica n.s. 1, 1 (February 1934).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2548573

Benjamin Seevers
Jun 17 2023 at 8:02pm

Thank you for sharing this. I was certainly aware of many of the arguments made in this paper, but I have not looked at until now. There are some quotes that support my thesis. Here are some I found interesting:

“Other product which is foregone when scarce factors are diverted in this way completely escaped their attention.”

“The only conceivable line for such an argument to take would seem to be that ultimately the inventions of a patentable type which will be made in response to the grant of a temporary monopoly will possess a sufficiently greater general usefulness than would result from the other inventions or other output immediately foregone, to outweigh the immediate loss.”

“Thus, for example, if a flying machine were needed capable of non-stop flights round the Equator, and machines with smaller ranges were of no utility, entrepreneurs might not be forth-coming and there might be a case for a special fund to finance the making of the invention. A patent system applicable to inventions in general clearly cannot be justified, however, by exceptional circumstances of this kind.”

” Expedients such as licences of right, nevertheless,cannot repair the lack of theoretical principle behind the wholepatent system. They can only serve to confine the evils of monopoly within the limits contemplated by the legislators; and, as I have endeavoured to show, the science of economics as it stands to-day furnishes no basis of justification for this enormous experiment in the encouragement of a particular activity by enabling monopolistic price control.”

Plant is clearly aware of the foregone production caused by IP protections, which partially contributes to his caution regarding it. IP is not an issue of property in the traditional sense either. As he notes, “they do not arise out of the scarcity of the
objects which become appropriated.” IP is essentially a matter of public policy and has costs and benefits that must be weighed to determine whether it should be applied in a certain case or not.

Combining his insights I note in the quotes above with the points I make in the article about subjectivity, it makes the position of intellectual property very untenable.

David Henderson
Jun 17 2023 at 5:31pm

You write:

As persuasive as this may be to laymen, it has a hidden premise; IP provides us with new goods and no relevant cost. There is no sacrifice.

That is not an accurate statement of the argument. The argument for patents is more nuanced. I’ll probably write a post in the next few days to explain why.

Benjamin Seevers
Jun 17 2023 at 7:14pm

This article is not meant to be a catch-all refutation of intellectual property. Within conservative circles, there is a tendency to support intellectual property protections for that reason. This argument is usually presented as being neutral to the market (without the IP protections, there would be no market in whatever good is being invented, so IP laws are not distorting the market). I perhaps could have emphasized that more, but responding to this claim was what motivated me to write this.

Like the hidden premise of many arguments for government interventions, it is assumed that the alternative to the intervention is not having a market. That, I think we can both agree, is false. IP increases returns to investment in innovative markets that require IP protection; therefore, drawing funds away from other methods of production.

At that point, defending IP takes a paternalistic attitude. Why is innovation in one market superior to simple production in another? Why should innovators who are less capable of protecting their ideas be protected at the expense of innovators who aren’t? That’s when one might say, “But we need good x or good y.” That is a value judgement, but every value judgement should be subjected to the market, not government intervention, if the market is going to be an accurate reflection of consumer desires. So, in the end, I am making a consumer sovereignty argument.

There are certainly more sophisticated arguments for and against, but I was just trying to make a point about it that from my experience is not emphasized.

Hopefully this clarified my article. I look forward to reading your post!

Jim Glass
Jun 19 2023 at 12:41am

IP increases returns to investment in innovative markets that require IP protection.

Not so. It makes possible new products from businesses that require IP to produce them. Big difference! There is no guarantee of any investment returns to any such businesses at all. Much less any “increase” in their market returns. Are you imagining some kind of unfair subsidy?

 

Therefore, drawing funds away from other methods of production.

Not so. A new IP business offers products that consumers may choose to buy, or not, and in which persons may choose to invest, or not. If they don’t choose to, then nothing is drawn from any other market or “means of production”.

If consumers do choose to, their welfare is enhanced, obviously, and the firm does draw funds away from the pre-existing businesses and “methods of production” — and so it should!  The consumers rule. Unless you are a protecionist of the very old sort. After all, it is not the “means of production” that matters, but the benefit to consumers.

 

I fear that you have mis-framed the issues in your mind. A real life example discussed on this site before may help clarify….

Massachusetts’s Route 128 historically was the state’s big “textile corridor”, with water-powered plants built since the 1800s to produce clothes, shoes, etc. By the late 1970s-1980s these were failing and the new booming tech-computer industry was moving in, buying out the failing textile businesses and converting their plants. The textile firms and their workers cried “save our jobs! protect us!” of course. But the tech firms won out.

Route 128 became Silicone Valley East. The US economy gained, the local economy gained higher wages and property values and tax receipts, even most of the workers at the old textile plants gained as the new firms paid higher wages to the accountants, secretaries, groundskeepers etc., who kept working there. A textbook example (literally) of the gains from free trade and free enterprise.

 

But wait. No?? These tech firms were 100% reliant on IP: copyright for software, patents for technology and processes, trade secrets for “secrets”, trademarks and trade names, etc. Totally! And you object to such IP because via it the government unfairly “increases returns to investment” of the tech firms – as some sort of subsidy? – which “is nothing short of arrogance.”?

But it did nothing of the kind. IP simply allowed the tech firms to exist to fail or not on their own. Giving consumers greater choice among more business products. So, two situations along Route 128:

1) Our reality, consumers had the choice of buying low-grade textiles or high-grade tech from firms along the route. They chose the tech, and thus the tech firms competed the textile firms away. The market decided, with gains for all.

2) Only low-grade textiles were produced along the route. No tech existed. No choice for consumers.

Which is better?

If the government forced #2 on consumers, would that be “arrogance”?

Jim Glass
Jun 19 2023 at 12:52am

Unrelated — about posting:

The formatting of the comments under different authors all seem different.  When I comment under Prof. Sumner everything is crushed together so I have to add extra breaks and empty lines to space things into readability. Now I just did the same here and the post is all excessively spread out (and I fear another in moderation will be more so.  Moderator: Feel free too hack it!)

Is this just me?  It’s happened repeatedly to me. But, to anyone else?  Is there a page somewhere with info about formatting comments that I’m missing?

Thanks.

 

Dylan
Jun 19 2023 at 8:02am

I haven’t made the connection that it might be author specific, but I have noticed that sometimes paragraphs seem to show up fine and other times not so much.  I had thought it might be related to the browser I was using or if I was posting from a phone, but haven’t made a systematic test.

To continue the tangent, a lot of features of the website seem to have disappeared or gotten worse over the last year or so.  I miss the previous article and next article navigation.  Also, this site seems to really hold the cache, so things like comment counts don’t refresh on the main page or under the articles unless I open them up in a private browsing session.

Michael Stack
Jun 18 2023 at 7:02am

Yes I came here to say exactly the same thing. The argument is that IP protection’s benefits outweigh the costs, not that there are no costs.

john hare
Jun 17 2023 at 7:21pm

If you are replying to me, you are way off base. Basically a patent that is not worth millions of dollars is a net loss. In the time and cost to file and by the time it is finally issued, the time of unique value has shrunk considerably. And the ability to protect that patent is one of the keys to making it worthwhile. If you can’t afford to protect it, it’s not worth the paper it is printed on.

My caveat is when the concept is so unique and valuable that it is worth all that hassle. Only when one is going for that multimillion dollar deal as in the shark tank that you mention, is all that paper worth having.

Another objection I have is that so many people have been convinced that The One Good Idea will make them rich. The odds are a bit better than becoming a pro athlete. The problem being that so many without the ability to perform on the field, or having an idea that is that uniquely valuable, often squander years on the unattainable.  If one doesn’t try, one has lost already, but if one chases a chimera, one loses anyway. Learning to tell the difference matters.

In a couple of cases, I was trying to get something done when I found out about a prior patent. In one case I was able to design a unique device that used a similar operating cycle. When you file a patent, you are telling the whole interested world what you have found, which makes it much easier for someone to work around the concept.  Trade secretes work better most of the time.

Apologies to all for the rant. Passionate on the subject both for myself, and for the people I have seen lose so much trying for the illusive wealth.

 

Jim Glass
Jun 18 2023 at 8:53pm

a hidden premise; IP provides us with new goods and no relevant cost. There is no sacrifice.

Well, no, IP is an economic technology. Substitute “technology” for “IP”. Thus: “a hidden premise; technology provides us with new goods and no relevant cost. There is no sacrifice.” Who believes that? Of any technology?

Arguments in favor of intellectual property (IP) boil down to innovation.

No -, and c’mon, you know better. You benefit from property rights in land, buildings, your car, the cash in your wallet, your wallet — do all your benefits from all these property rights “boil down to innovation”? If not, then why would all benefits from property rights in IP do so?

If not for giving company X a monopoly on producing good Y, good Y would have never been produced,

Again, I’m sure you know better. Land, resources (e.g., fisheries), water, certainly aren’t “produced” via property rights. Many people (Georgists, left-Greens, Marxists) consider such rights to be immoral, as they must have been ‘stolen’ from … er, someone. But most of us consider such rights to have valuable benefits. If you are one of us, you must value those benefits too. Correct? So what are they? And why don’t they also attach to IP?

but the cost of the protection is not simply lower production relative to a competitive market and higher prices, but foregone investment into alternative production

What? You make many sweeping assertions based on no factual evidence. Let’s look at some real cases and see how often these claims are true:

 

[] We have zero authoritative copies of Shakespeare’s plays. His own actors didn’t have copies. Each received only his own lines in a “cue script” — because there was no copyright. Zero copies kept them from being swiped and produced by competitors. So Will’s plays were gone when he died, then fortuitously kludged together after the fact by those who didn’t want them to be lost forever. But the texts are disputed, authorship of some is questioned, some are thought lost… Good thing?

Now multiply by all the other famous playwrights of the “golden age of Elizabethan theatre” who weren’t Shakespeare and so didn’t have their plays kludged back together. Scores of famous-by-reputation plays lost forever. Because of no copyright.

Note the losses were first to the Elizabethans, with fewer productions of best plays by best writers, no marketing of them to the public, less business in theaters, etc.  Plus great losses to posterity.

I call these unhappy losses “underproduction in the competitive market because of a lack of copyright”. But maybe you believe that if the Elizabethans had copyright then the result would have been even worse, even “Lower production relative to a competitive market” and also “foregone investment into alternative production” ? If so, please explain.

 

[] Scott Adams struggles for years, then creates Dilbert, sells it to a few papers — and, absent IP, Disney says “MINE!” and takes it. OK by you? What happens to the cartoonists, to photographers, writers who start small, strike success .,.. and have their work confiscated by Engulf & Devour Media?

[] When I was young, IBM was the monopolist of business computing. If it could have just swallowed up all the computer code owned by little Microsoft and tiny Apple and all the other tech start-ups of the 1980s onward, what kind of computer would you be writing on today? A Selectric Model 17?

Note how IP protects also small-guy innovators against the Big Corps, contrary to the popular anti-IP caricature. But let’s give Big Corp some empathy too…

[] No copyright, and this holiday weekend you could enjoy watching Mickey Mouse, The Little Mermaid and the Super Mario Brothers in for-proft hard-core porn productions on PornHub, SpankBang and all the rest. Good thing?  (Shush! some of you!)

 

Now, in response to all this you might say: “Just repeal IP rights, and the magical free markets would work it out”. And you’d be right! There is a very long, well-known history of the world without copyright, and how the markets did work it out. They created copyright. Market participants can reach a consensus and talk to their legislators. That is permitted.

 

Ok, as to patents and the now $1 billion+ average cost of new drugs, if you stop these R&D costs from being recovered via patent protection, your…

Are we to suspect that pharmaceutical companies will simply give up? Definitely not; they will just adopt a different business model.

… is pretty glib as to $1 billion+ per product! 🙂  Yet you are correct, they will adopt a new business model. And just as with the world without copyright, we know what those models are from from long historical experience of the world without patents. Take your choice of these: They …

* stop investing in research and focus on selling generics and imports. (I mean, what would you do?) and/or…

* the government (i.e. politicians) takes over funding and control. and/or…

* natural monopoly will emerge, Engulf & Devour Medical. With huge up-front cost & minimal marginal production cost, this is the free-market outcome. This is why Google, Apple, Amazon, and your local utility totally dominate their market segments.

Which points out that if IBM could have just taken the patent-less tech of all its tech-innovating competitors of the 1980s (as well as the software code) well, maybe today you’d be writing on a Selectric 14?

Ultimately, many, many people are harmed in order to provide protection for someone else’s idea in excess of the free market quantity of protection.

Really??? Who are the many, many, people harmed by protecting cartoonists, photographers, writers, artists, from having their work confiscated by Disney, or by Engulf & Devour Media?

And who were the many, many people harmed by protecting all the small tech startups in the 1980s from IBM?

Prioritizing one innovation over another is nothing short of arrogance

I agree! Now please explain how the IP laws that protected all the very many small tech startups of the 1980s and their new ideas from being engulfed and devoured by IBM “prioritized one innovation over another”. Seriously.

Same as to all the countless small artists, writers, photographers etc., protected from having their works and ideas confiscated by Disney and Engulf & Devour Media. This “prioritized one innovation over another”?  How?

 

Also, you forgot to mention that patents, in addition to having limited duration, require the owner to publish the work going into the patent — so competitors can dupe the patent research without paying for it and can use it to leapfrog the patents … thus spurring innovation and competition.

Now if a firm wants to avoid that patent-created risk to its business by keeping an idea truly secret, forever, it can do so via “trade secret”. E.g., the formula for Coca Cola if patented (under today’s rules) would have been published to the world in 1886 and available for anyone to use in 1906. But Coca Cola prefers to keep it in the vault as a trade secret. Although trade secrets are IP too. So you also want to force Coca Cola to open its vault?

 

And trademarks are IP too … but this has been too much already.

So I’ll just say, try to look our for “unseen benefits” as well.

JdL
Jun 19 2023 at 7:51am

“Arguments in favor of intellectual property (IP) boil down to innovation.”

No, they don’t.  They boil down to not stealing someone else’s work, but rather paying his asking price or foregoing taking possession of a copy.

vince
Jun 19 2023 at 1:06pm

 

Someone please clarify.

 Protectionism is bad.
  Industrial policy is bad.
  IP is good!

 

Mark Brady
Jun 19 2023 at 5:18pm

A word of advice.  A debate about patents and patent law should not be conflated with a debate about either copyright and copyright law, or trademarks and trademark law, or trade secrets and trade secret law.  That way lies confusion.

That said, one can of course debate the principle of intellectual property.  However, almost all the proponents of IP seek limitations to the scope and term of patents and copyrights.

James R Glass
Jun 20 2023 at 1:39pm

A word of advice.  A debate about patents and patent law should not be conflated with a debate about either copyright and copyright law, or trademarks and trademark law, or trade secrets and trade secret law.  That way lies confusion.

Of course.  And federal law defines IP as copyright, patents, trade secrets and trademarks.  (Back to Section 8 of the US Constitution.)   So if one criticizes “IP” without meaning “IP”,  yeah … it’s like saying  “All European are evil”, while meaning just the Scots.

That said, all forms of IP are driven by the same fundamental economic issue:  High initial product creation cost & very low marginal production cost, & competitive market prices driving product price down to marginal cost of production = a product that can’t pay for itself.   Gotta fix that some way.

Jim Glass
Jun 20 2023 at 1:13pm

Benjamin, IP products and services contributed $7.8 trillion to GDP in 2019,  (says the USPTO), 36% of the total  Is your reasoning as convincing when applied to this data, instead of the EpiPen anecdote?

it may be the case that developing these products and services totaling more than a third of the US economy would not have happened in a society absent of IP protections; however, this is not a reason to support IP…

In this example, if there had been no IP protections, this 36% of GDP would not have been developed, but the investors and producers of it would not have gone home and become couch potatoes! Their capital would have been directed to some other productive endeavors, perhaps in other industries entirely…

And these other endeavors in other industries, who knows, might have been just as, or even more, worthy and valuable as our actual 36% of GDP created via IP. Thus it is “arrogant” and “paternalistic” for government to enable the creation of this actual 36% of our GDP.

But wait, what? Exactly what other non-IP industries could produce as much or more than 36% of US GDP? Clearly none, it is impossible, because these non-IP industries all already exist and if they produced greater returns than IP industries they’d already be doing it, instead of the IP industries, via the market.

OK, yes, obviously investors and producers would put their capital in something else if not IP. But in what, where? In upgrading textile plants along Route 128? In the tech industries of other countries that do have IP laws, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Europe, China…?

Hey, I started as a student of philosophy and econ too, so I empathize and feel guilty about writing so much in response to you.  (Maybe reminding me of my young self irritates me.)  But I learned the long-and-hard way during my career of law & econ battles that full data & hard facts on the ground defeat reasoning from high principles and anecdote every time.   Don’t repeat my mistakes!

Richard W Fulmer
Jun 21 2023 at 5:07pm

Years ago, Russ Roberts did an EconTalk on the fashion industry, which is profitable and innovative (perhaps too innovative) even though fashion designs are not protected by IP laws.

Jim Glass
Jun 22 2023 at 6:17pm

“In recent years, intellectual property (IP) rights have played a pivotal role in the growth of the highly competitive global fashion industry, which generates more than USD 2 trillion per year….”

https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2018/04/article_0006.html

Anyhow, what’s the point of arguing by anecdote?  The USPTO says IP is responsible only for 36% of GDP, not 100%.

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