Courts, commentators, and even casebooks mistakenly assume that intellectual property laws are fundamentally utilitarian and thus the relevant objective for intellectual property laws is maximizing social welfare. Economic theories of intellectual property dominate while rights-based theories...

Copyright law provides an excellent case study with which to study and evaluate Harold Demsetz's theory of property rights. Regardless of how one feels about the relationship between property and intellectual property, it is hard to escape the fact that intellectual property rights have expanded...