I attended the unveiling of the 2010 International Property Rights Index on Tuesday.  Doug Bandow provides a helpful overview of the report at American Spectator, and the executive summary of the report here (PDF).  I’ll cut to the chase: Finland came in #1 and the US was not in the top 10; though the US did score well for intellectual property protections.  The entire report made it very clear that strong property rights correlate very strongly with economic success.  Developing countries with weak property rights….struggle.

It seems to me that this is very relevant for technology policy. The Internet is a global “developing economy”.  However, the international nature of the Internet makes it fairly difficult to incorporate intellectual property rights into enforceable law.  And more recently, there have been increasing political attacks on either technology or business models that might make intellectual property rights more enforceable – or at least disadvantage IP theft versus voluntary market activity.

As Rep. Bishop pointed out at the event, restrictions on the use of property may not show up in official records as “taking”, but they amount to a dramatic reduction in property rights.

At the conclusion of the event, I asked Victoria Strokova – the author of the IPRI report – whether it was possible to measure the impact of regulatory and legislative restrictions on digital distribution and business models.  She indicates that it should be, though neither of us are aware of such research.  Indeed, it may be that these emerging business models are so new that there simply isn’t sufficient opportunity cost data to measure it effectively.

That will be an interesting realm for research. If content creators are stripped of the right to control the sale and distribution of their own content, they will be forced into “free” and advertising supported models.  This reduction in property rights – a “taking” – will, in many cases, have a profoundly negative impact on the value of their intellectual property.