ABSTRACT
The previous research has not reached a consensus on whether the protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) stimulates innovation, especially in the digital era. And due to the lack of exogenous variation of copyright statute, solid evidence on the causal effect of copyright protection is still scarce. In this paper, we investigate the effect of a special campaign about IPR protection in China on short video creation. With a stratified random sample of 16,011 short videos created during 2019-2020 on one of the leading short video platforms, we find support for the innovation promotion effect, the propagation impediment effect and the quality stimulation effect of the strengthened IPR policy. And we also find that the innovation promotion effect is heterogeneous for short videos with different themes and is partially attributed to the stimulation of creators’ incentive for devoting effort to original short video production. We confirm our main results by executing several robustness tests. This paper contributes to the research on intellectual property rights and digital innovation, and provides practical guidance for governments, platforms and creators.
Huang, Jinglei and Hao, Fei and Rong, Ke and Xie, Danxia, Copyright Protection and Creativity Promotion: Evidence from Short Video Industry (July 7, 2022).
First posted 2022-07-20 11:30:29
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