The Law and Economics of Artists' Inalienable Rights

This paper provides an overview of the economic analysis of inalienability, here defined in the narrow sense of restrictions on whether and how ownership of a right may be transferred to someone else. It then considers three aspects of the laws relating to artists and their works that are subject to some inalienability restrictions: droit de suite, moralrights, and unconstitutional conditions. It is suggested that inalienability restrictions designed to achieve distributional goals are probably misguided, and that although in theory one could derive some efficiency arguments for inalienability rules, in practice it is not clear that they apply to these examples from the laws relating to artists.