The Big Steal Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property

In The Big Steal, Jonathan Barnett documents the unusual confluence of ideological commitments and business interests behind the across-the-board dilution of legal protections for inventors and artists under U.S. patent and copyright law. Concurrently with the rise of the digital economy and platform-based markets, the Supreme Court, Congress, and antitrust regulators significantly weakened legal protections against the unauthorized use of technological inventions and creative works. Under the popular slogan that "information wants to be free," significant portions of the scholarly and tech communities advocated and welcomed the erosion of property rights in knowledge markets. This policy shift often relied on incomplete or premature findings that concerning the impact of robust intellectual property rights on innovation markets.

Through a rich analysis that draws on law, economics, and political science, and using evidence from a wide range of technology and creative markets, Barnett shows that the depropertization of intellectual assets poses a risk to the U.S. and global innovation ecosystem by shifting economic value toward digital intermediaries and vertically integrated entities and away from the technology and content originators that drive the most robust knowledge economies.

Jonathan M. Barnett is the Torrey H. Webb Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, Gould School of Law, and director of the law school's Media, Entertainment and Technology Law Program. He specializes in antitrust, competition, and intellectual property law and policy, with a focus on monetization strategies and organizational structures in content and technology markets. He has published widely in scholarly and policy publications and comments regularly on innovation policy matters in the press and at professional conferences. Prior to academia, he practiced corporate law at a leading international law firm, specializing in mergers and acquisitions.