Intellectual property and time: a behavioral example

Abstract

This chapter presents an empirical study exploring how people perceive future incentive effects created by copyright law. In particular, we explore whether financial incentives created by copyright protection far in the future have a relevant impact on the present incentive to create. In a utilitarian copyright system, such questions of intertemporal decision-making may directly affect how long copyright protection should last. As our study will show, the vast majority of participants in our study drastically overestimate the present value of incentives created by copyright protection far in the future. These results suggest that behavioral, non-rational creators might perceive the incentive to create differently than predicted by standard copyright models. This would have implications for understanding how copyright protection works and calculating the optimal size of incentives provided by copyright law.