Where Did All the Creativity Go?

I’m glad to see that my view that excessively robust regimes of intellectual property protection reduce creativity is gaining empirical support. The National Bureau of Economic Research has a new study that suggests that an increasing pool of patents actually inhibited innovation (as illustrated in the graph above).

Here’s one interesting conclusion:

Interestingly, the data yield no evidence that copyright extensions encourage creativity.

One of my earliest posts contained evidence that there were fewer copyrights previous to the 1999 copyright extension than before it. We are working under a flawed 18th century theory of creativity under which innovations spring fully formed from the brows of their creators like Athena from the brow of Zeus. The reality is that every innovation is built on previous innovations and creation de novo is extremely rare.