Scarcity and IP

A response to "IP in a World Without Scarcity":

Mark Lemley defends the necessity of protecting Intellectual Property (IP) by arguing that maintaining the scarcity of new ideas is what pushes innovation forward according to economic principles. Given the state of the world now, where ideas, people, and more open and interconnected than ever, this argument of scarcity begins to fall apart.

I argue that in today's day and age, more people are working on more ideas than ever before. This can't be anything but conducive to increasing the value and variety of IP. Whereas Lemley argues that the advent of "cost-reducing technologies" that distribute such ideas and IP is detrimental to the scarcity that drives our economy, I claim that the availability and accessibility of these more powerful tools have given us stronger propensity to a greater variety and depth of ideas.

A utilitarian would disagree with Lemley's argument. If the argument for the overall diversity and impact of these ideas is decreasing when scarcity is enforced, then a utilitarian would agree with the claim that the overall utility of the population has decreased. Given that the best policy is to produce more and higher-impact ideas, we need not be concerned with scarcity but how technology can accelerate the executation and propagaion of great ideas. As iterative and dynamic race, we need more ideas to filter and sieve out better ideas. As a sharp sword sharpens another, a technological era can only improve the quality and quantity of ideas by acting as a catalyst to this naturally human process.