Read the document @ http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/400.pdf…
Harvard Law Review, Vol. 122, 2009
Copyright law’s principal justification today is the economic theory of creator incentives. Central to this theory is the recognition that while copyright’s exclusive rights framework provides creators with an economic incentive to create, it also entails large social costs, and that creators therefore need to be given just enough incentive to create in order to balance the system’s benefits against its costs. Yet, none of copyright’s current doctrines enable courts to circumscribe a creator’s entitlement by reference to limitations inherent in the very idea of incentives. While the common law too relies on providing actors with incentives to behave in certain ways, it recognizes that its incentive structure has outer limits and that failing to calibrate an entitlement or liability with these limits in mind is likely to prove inefficient. The principal mechanism that it employs to this end is the concept of foreseeability. Premised on the idea that individuals do not ordinarily consider consequences that are temporally or causally far removed from their actions, foreseeability allows courts to balance a regime’s ex ante incentive effects against its ex post costs when determining liability.
