Summary on Intellectual Property

All in all, we observe that intellectual property rights are a limited and incomplete solution to the incentive problem; and intellectual property rights impose some costs on society that to some extent offset the benefits of increased incentives to the production of information products. This is a second-best solution, and there may be a need for other, complementary public policies to encourage the production of information products. We may get some further insight on this problem by looking at it from a different point of view -- not from the point of view of competitive and monopoly markets, as we have been doing, but from the point of view of efficient government activity; that is, the theory of "public goods."

Information as a Quasi-public Good