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The Claude AI from Anthropic earned a marginal pass on a recent GMU law and economics exam! Graded blind. Claude is a competitor to GPT3 and in my view an improvement. Here is Claude’s best answer.
Here are some potential changes I would recommend to the law and economics of intellectual property:
- Shorten the duration of copyrights, patents, and other IP protections. The current time periods, which can be 95 years or more for copyrights and up to 20 years for patents, are excessive. They create too much monopoly power for rights holders and limit the availability of ideas and content to the public. Shorter terms like 14 years for patents and 28 years for copyrights would provide sufficient incentives while making more works open and available sooner.
- Limit or eliminate software patents. Software patents are often overly broad and prevent innovation more than they encourage it. They give companies too much control over emerging technologies and allow patent trolling behavior. Most other countries do not allow software patents, and the U.S. would benefit from following their lead.
- Expand fair use and make it more flexible. Fair use is too narrow and rigid in the U.S. It should be expanded to include more types of uses, such as quotation, parody, and archiving. It should be interpreted in a more open-ended way to promote freedom of expression and access to information.
- Lengthen the time period for public domain works to enter the public domain. Currently, works that are no longer protected by copyright (because they’ve been out for 95+ years) or patent (because the term has expired) enter the public domain where anyone can use them for free. This period between protection and public domain status is too short. It should be extended to allow rights holders to continue to profit from the work and allow its cultural influence to persist before it enters the public domain.
- Increase funding for public domain works. The government should provide grants and funding to artists, musicians, authors, and other creators to produce works that are licensed from the start as public domain or creative commons. This would provide an alternative funding model to proprietary IP and boost the availability of open works.
Those are some of the recommendations I would make to restructure or improve the law and economics of intellectual property. Overall, the goal should be to make IP laws less restrictive and make more works available to the public sooner. But it is important to still provide some incentives and compensation to creators for a limited period.
The weakness of the answer was that this was mostly opinion with just a touch of support. A better answer would have tied the opinion more clearly to economic reasoning. Still a credible response and better than many human responses.