Knowledge and Its Inventors/Carriers in Evolutionary Economics: Towards A Relational Theory of Authorship and Copyright

Abstract

The growth of knowledge and the development of culture is a cumulative process based on a vast variety of distributed creative and intellectual activities of many individuals. In contrast to classical and neoclassical economics, evolutionary economics claims to deal 'essentially with slowly changing variables'; and the evolutionary economists are 'concerned mainly with change, not with the principles of resource allocation in a hypothetical static world'. Therefore, the evolutionary economics is a much more realistic approach to understand why people are creative, how the human mind originates novel ideas and what the nature of knowledge growth really is. Based on neo-Schumpeterian or evolutionary economics, this article aims to scrutinize the process and the nature of knowledge growth (including the origination, dissemination, adoption and retention of knowledge); and thereafter articulates a regulatory framework (copyright in particular) that is favorable to such process. To this end, this article proposes a relational theory of authorship which sees intellectual creations as a cumulative and collaborative process with involvement of massive amounts of individuals, and furthermore, intellectual and artistic creations are merely by-products of people's daily engagement in communication and creativity. The authors should not be regarded merely as Homo Oeconomicus whose production activities are perceived as a response to external incentives; instead, their commitment to the production of expressive works is driven primarily by their needs of communication and furthermore analysis on their behavior should focus on their propensity to originate, adopt and retain rules and knowledge.