What’s a Name Worth? We Ran a Photo Contest to Find Out...
In my last post, I wrote about laboratory research, undertaken with my friend and co-author Chris Buccafusco, that looks at how artists – specifically, poets and painters – value their creative works. Our research suggests that creators are subject to a psychological quirk, a sort of optimism bias, which causes them to value their works, on average, substantially above what a willing buyer would be willing to pay. We called this finding the creativity effect.
The existence of a creativity effect has significant consequences. Conventional legal thinking about innovation and creativity relies on the concept of a rational innovator. Indeed, an ideal version of the rational innovator is the basis for our patent and copyright laws, which are meant to spur creative effort and bring us more new inventions and artistic works. Patent and copyright law work by giving property rights to creators. But property rights are not valuable in the abstract. They are useful only if the underlying creative work—the novel, the film, the computer software, the new drug—is valuable. If a creator's work is worth money, then having the exclusive right to offer it for sale or license—which is what copyright and patent law give to authors and inventors—is a very nice thing indeed.