Productivity Commission Issues Paper - Intellectual Property Arrangements

There exists a large body of economic research that has attempted to analyse whether or not intellectual property (IP) encourages innovation, and to provide an analytical framework, including appropriate measurements on which to base this analysis. However, we are not aware of any comprehensive framework for addressing the question of whether IP rights encourage genuinely innovative and creative output. Nor are we aware of the existence of an appropriate measure of the overall impact of IP to determine whether creative or innovative outputs would nevertheless have occurred in its absence.