Episode 117: The Big Steal – How Weak IP Rights Undermine Innovation and Markets with Jonathan Barnett

Global Economy Podcast

ECIPE

Business

4.2 • 5 Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

ECIPE’s Fredrik Erixon talks to Professor Jonathan Barnett, from the University of Southern California, about his recent book The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property. Together, they discuss how policymakers have weakened IP protections in the last decades, partly because of shifting technologies and new ideas, and distorted innovation incentives. As a result, innovation and value generation have shifted between sectors and business models. The conversation also covers how strong IP rights contribute to long-term, high-value innovation, new entrepreneurship, and competition, drawing implications for Europe and global policy reform. You can watch a video recording of this conversation here. You can read a transcript of the chat here. Order Professor Barnett’s book “The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property” here. Jonathan M. Barnett is the Torrey H. Webb Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, Gould School of Law, and director of the law school’s Media, Entertainment and Technology Law Program. He specialises in innovation law and policy, including antitrust, competition, corporate, and intellectual property law, with a focus on monetisation strategies and organisational structures in content and technology markets. He has published widely in scholarly and policy publications and comments regularly on innovation and competition policy in the press and at professional conferences. Prior to academia, he practised corporate law at a leading international law firm, specialising in mergers and acquisitions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to ESAB's Global Economy Podcast.
0:15.0	My name is Freda Gerickson and in this episode we are going to talk about modern economies, economies that run on investments
0:24.7	in research and development and of course innovation. Those that have followed some of the
0:30.6	stuff I have written in papers and books like The Innovation Illusion know that I've been wrestling
0:35.1	with what seems like a paradox. Many countries in the
0:39.0	world spend an increasing amount of money on research, development, knowledge, human capital,
0:45.8	generating new intellectual assets. However, it is not obvious always that all these resources
0:52.3	lead to so much more innovation and value generation
0:55.8	in the world. Yes, of course, we talk a lot about one sector with innovation-driven growth,
1:02.0	but for a few decades, the scale and pace of innovation have almost exclusively been concentrated
1:08.6	to this one sector, namely computer software and data technology.
1:14.2	In many other sectors, if I'm allowed to generalize, I hear a lot of talk about innovation
1:19.4	and that we are the verge of path-breaking developments, but I actually struggled to see them,
1:25.3	for instance, in sectors like life sciences and transport.
1:28.3	So how can we explain this paradox?
1:31.3	Is it about the intellectual property system and growing problems over decades for investors in new intellectual property to actually benefit financially from these investments?
1:42.3	To help me better understand this, I am very glad to be
1:46.6	joined by Professor Jonathan Barnett, a law professor at the University of Southern California,
1:52.4	who is also the author of a fascinating book called The Big Steel, ideology, interest, and the
1:59.7	undoing of intellectual property.
2:03.0	The book was released by Oxford University Press last year, but I think the European
2:08.2	release was early this year because that's when I picked up the book.
	...

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