Professor Chris Buccafusco has authored a new post on children, creativity, and their relation to intellectual property at the blog Jotwell (“Out of the Mouths of Babes: Studying Children’s Judgments about Creativity, Ideas, and Ownership“). In the post, Buccafusco unpacks Kristina Olson’s article Children Apply Principles of Physical Ownership to Ideas (co-authored with Alex Shaw and Vivian Li, 36 Cognitive Science 1383 (2012)) and draws out its implications for intellectual property. Read an excerpt from the post below:
Legal scholars who study intellectual property rarely think about children. Children are almost never inventors of patented technologies, and, although children’s drawings technically receive copyright protection the moment they are created, children rarely appear as litigants in disputes.
But recent research coming from psychologist Kristina Olson’s lab suggests that we should be thinking more about children. In their new paper, Olson and her graduate students Alex Shaw and Vivian Li, report the results of experiments testing children’s intuitions about the ownership of ideas. This paper provides an interesting insight into the development of our ideas about intellectual property and creativity, and it should be widely read by IP scholars.
Olson is interested in learning how and when children’s judgments about creativity, ideas, and ownership emerge. Research by other developmental psychologists had shown that very young children (2+ years old) apply concepts of ownership to physical objects. In earlier work, Olson showed that 6-year-old, but not 4-year-old, children respond negatively to those who plagiarize others’ ideas. That research suggested the possibility that children of a certain age think about ideas as things that can be owned.
Continue reading Prof. Buccafusco’s post at Jotwell (Intellectual Property Section).
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