Blog post by Stephen Wyber
It is almost a cliché, in documents concerning how we can boost growth and competitiveness, to find references to the need to ‘strengthen and protect intellectual property rights’.
It can feel like the statement is taken, uncritically, as a given – something that you say as a bit of economic common sense. But does it hold up to scrutiny? More importantly, is it accurate to group all intellectual property (IP) rights under one umbrella?
IP Is Good, and More IP Is Better?
The logic behind the argument that intellectual property is good for competitiveness, and so more of it is better, builds on the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter in the early 20th century.
He looked in particular at patents, reasoning that by giving inventors the possibility to demand compensation for use, it becomes possible to recover innovation costs and invest in new ideas. This, in turn, would drive socially beneficial innovation that might not occur without financial incentives.
However, this argument has faced criticism:
- Some point to system abuse, such as patent thickets, rollover patents, or aggressive trademark lawsuits.
- Others highlight the negative externalities—the costs imposed on others when access to ideas and innovations is restricted.
However, an issue that is not raised anywhere near enough in discussions about competitiveness is the fact that different intellectual property rights affect different stages of the research and innovation process, and do so in different ways.
Should Copyright Get a Free Pass?
In particular, copyright stands out as mainly having an influence upstream, while patents and trademarks (which protect the results of research and innovation) have more of a downstream impact.
This isn’t a fully clear distinction—often, creating new products may require using previously patented ideas. The EU’s own IP Action Plan includes significant focus on how to facilitate licensing in order to enable new technologies to emerge.
Nonetheless, and with the exception of the outputs of the entertainment industry (representing just 1.7% of EU GDP), copyright stands out for being less about a driver of competitiveness, and more as a potential barrier to this.
The same IP Action Plan makes 15 references to copyright in its main text (compared to 39 to patents), with almost half of these referring to efforts to enable access, rather than to strengthen protection. Copyright also doesn’t feature in the Plan’s list of actions to better protect IP.
Crucially, copyright (and related rights) regulates the inputs to research—existing articles, datasets, even materials for AI training. Copyright-related restrictions therefore do not encourage research and innovation, but rather risk holding it back.
While there clearly is a need to find ways to pay for infrastructures to enable the dissemination and sharing of materials, this needs to be weighed against the research and innovation penalty they can impose if not well designed.
Perhaps the most damning indication that copyright should not be allowed to sit alongside patents and trademarks as being associated with innovation and competitiveness is the rise of the open access and open science/scholarship movement, driven by libraries and researchers.
These movements represent, effectively, a rejection of the whole logic of copyright by using an opt-out from protections. This is driven not only by a desire for fairness (both for the taxpayers funding much research, and to ensure that wealth is not a determinant of access to research), but also the fact that openness favours dissemination and take-up of new ideas (i.e. further research and innovation).
A More Nuanced Approach
All this points to a need to stop making generalisations around IP rights. Instead, there needs to be a more nuanced approach, recognising that copyright is not like other intellectual property rights.
While it may indeed have a role in enabling the business models that underpin the entertainment industry, it interacts with the research and innovation sectors in very different ways to other IP rights: when misused, it becomes more of a barrier than an enabler.
It’s time to stop giving copyright a free pass, and question its role in growth and competitiveness. We need to take far more care when thinking—and talking—about how to boost research, innovation and competitiveness in Europe.
24 March 2025
