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Intellectual property (IP) law is premised on assumptions about creative behavior. Fundamentally, the case for regulation assumes that creators require a legal right to prevent copying, or they will under-invest in new works. But this premise fails to fully capture the reality of creative production. It ignores the range of powerful non-economic motivations that compel creativity. Equally importantly, it overlooks the capacity of creative industries for self-governance and innovative social and market responses to appropriation. This book reveals the on-the-ground practices of a range of creators and innovators. In doing so, it challenges intellectual property orthodoxy by showing that incentives for creative production often exist in the absence of, or in disregard for, formal legal protections. Instead, these communities rely on evolving social norms and market responses—sensitive to their particular cultural, competitive, and technological circumstances—to ensure creative incentives. From tattoo artists to medical researchers, Nigerian filmmakers to roller derby players, the communities illustrated in this book demonstrate that creativity can thrive without legal incentives, and perhaps more strikingly, that some creative communities prefer self-regulation to law. Beyond their value as descriptions of specific industries and communities, the accounts collected here help to ground debates over IP policy in the empirical realities of the creative process. Their parallels and divergences also highlight the value of rules that are sensitive to the unique mix of conditions and motivations of particular industries and communities, rather than the monoculture of uniform regulation of the current IP system.

Skateboarding LA is about professional street skateboarding, a highly refined, athletic, and aesthetic pursuit, from which a large number of people profit. (Skateboarding has been estimated to be a $5 billion annual industry.) Street skateboarders see the world differently because they are skating on it, and to do so they creatively interpret architectural features—ledges, banks, gaps, stairs, and handrails—in order to perform tricks. The tricks they perform are filmed and photographed and then disseminated to a global subculture via numerous platforms—videos, magazines, social media, websites. Skaters do this to increase their reputations, and hence their earnings. This ethnographic study of skateboarding, based upon over eight years of participant observation in Los Angeles, offers thick cultural description that provides outsiders some insight into the process of this complex, but mostly misunderstood subculture. The themes of this research revolve around the idea of subculture careers, subculture media, subculture enclaves, and subculture community, all of which call for a reassessment of much of the existing literature surrounding the sociological and political significance of subcultures. This detailed study of skating was facilitated by the author’s relationship to his key informant, former professional skater Aaron Snyder, who is also his younger brother. Together they show that more than petty vandalism and exaggerated claims of destruction, skateboarding creates opportunities for skaters the world over and draws highly talented people to cities where professional skateboarders congregate.