The cultural turn in copyright law identified authorship as a rhetorical construct employed by economic interests as a mechanism to establish claims to property rights. Grassroots intellectual property political movements have been seen as both a means of countering these interests’...

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the adoption of copyrights - as a result of the timing of Napoléon's military victories in Italy - to examine the effects of copyrights on creativity. To measure changes in creative output we compare changes in the creation of new operas across states...