Part 2 of a series: The Great Fallacy
of Intellectual Property
A growing literature, primarily from social scientists, shows that for creative labor, intrinsic motivation – as opposed to extrinsic motivation – is the most important stimulus to action.
At this point, such research has scarcely been cited in legal scholarship about IP. Yet the implications for intellectual property policy are enormous. Copyright and patent laws aim to provide creators and inventors with extrinsic motivations. But this new scholarship from outside the legal academy suggests that, as a general matter, it is simply wrong to assume that extrinsic motivation is necessary for creative and inventive activity.
An excellent introduction to this work comes from lawyer and business-writer Daniel H. Pink. In his popular book Drive, Pink surveys the literature and explores the implications for modern business-management thinking.
Pink doesn't write about intellectual property. His intended audience is business people – particularly those managing employees who are called upon to engage in creative, innovative work. But most of what Pink says has tremendous implications for intellectual property policy.
“Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us,” writes Pink. “They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it’s pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.”
Pink explains that beyond primal urges and responses to rewards and punishments, we have what he calls “a third drive.” He explains, “We do things because they’re interesting, because they’re engaging, because they’re the right things to do, [and] because they contribute to the world[.]”
These claims are both banal and revolutionary.
On the one hand, it is entirely obvious that people are motivated to undertake creative endeavors by something other than extrinsic rewards and punishments.
On the other hand, in the context of economics and business-management discourse, these contentions are positively heretical. In conventional economic models, money is understood to be the universal currency for all wants and desires. And in the business world, it is rare to regard employees as being inherently motivated to do challenging, brain-intensive creative work.
This strain of thinking – that extrinsic motivation is needed for creative labor – not only dominates thinking about management and economics, it dominates discourse about intellectual-property policy as well. The very underpinning of IP law is the idea that the heavy hand of the courts is necessary to allow creativity to thrive. Pink's book, and the literature he cites, suggests that may be wrong.
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