Part 3 of a series: The Great Fallacy
of Intellectual Property
In this series of posts, I’m taking on what I'm calling the great fallacy of intellectual property law – the idea that IP rights are needed to provide financial rewards that are necessary to induce creative and inventive labor.
It is increasingly clear, based on social science research, that intrinsic motivation is generally more important than extrinsic motivation when it comes to tasks that are creative in nature. That puts IP on the sidelines.
But there's something even more astounding: It turns out that there is good evidence that extrinsic rewards can actually be detrimental to creativity. That is, they can do more harm than good. This is the conclusion reached by writers in the fields of business-management, psychology, and economics.
In the book The Social Psychology of Creativity, Teresa M. Amabile of Harvard Business School makes the general claim (at p. 91) that, absent a few special cases:
[T]he intrinsically motivated state is conducive to creativity, whereas the extrinsically motivated state is detrimental.
That is a stunning claim when considered in the context of our history of our IP policy. But there’s a lot of evidence supporting it.
Edward L. Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard M. Ryan conducted a meta-analysis ([pdf]) that looked over a slew of research. Their bottom line?
Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments leads to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation, with the limiting conditions we have specified. Even when tangible rewards are offered as indicators of good performance, they typically decrease intrinsic motivation for interesting activities.
How well intellectual property – as one kind of extrinsic reward – fits into this picture is something that begs for some deep thinking and some empirical research as well. But the scientific research in its current state certainly suggests that, at a minimum, it is erroneous to work from the starting assumption, as IP does, that financial rewards are a necessary inducement to creative labors.
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