This article gives a nice introduction into intellectual property law–the most obvious response to a question like “what is the law’s role in promoting innovation”.

http://www.wipo.int/sme/en/documents/ip_innovation_development_fulltext.html

The article is useful in that it defines innovation from the legal perspective, where it used more as a verb rather than a noun: “The term ‘innovation’ is used here to refer to the process of bringing valuable new products (goods and services) to market i.e., from the idea/concept formulation stage to the successful launching of a new or improved product in the marketplace², or the result of that process, so as to meet the explicit or implied needs of current or potential customers. In other words, through innovation an enterprise seeks to deliver unique new value to its customers.”

This differs from what many of us would define as innovation from a noun -sense: a product or result of a unique way of thinking that motivates certain actions to create that new product.

I think this is interesting as it inherently shows the position of the World Intellectual Property Organization. The law’s role in innovation is to help new products come to market–not in helping with the actual initial design of the product. Of course, this makes sense historically. Law has been used to patent new inventions that in turn help the product come to market by also keeping copy-cat versions from competing. However, I wonder if that conception will change in the future. With the rise of open source code (which I admit to knowing very little about aside from what I write in this sentence), developers can access what are effectively code templates to build new code with. I wonder if in the future there will be laws regulating those codes (or maybe there are already now…would be interested in reading if someone responds to this blog) aside from the traditional licensing type laws we see with digital software now.