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Innovation drives economic growth and sustains a country’s commercial development. Defending intellectual property rights is vital to promote innovation and creativity and serves as an essential ingredient in market-based economies. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are the principal legal tools used to establish ownership of creative ideas in their various forms, providing the foundation for generating tangible benefits that accrue to companies, workers, and consumers (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 2012). Without legal protection, creators of intellectual property would tend to lose the economic fruits of their work and the motivations to develop additional innovations.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) defines “copyright”—or author’s right—as the legal rights that creators have over their literary and artistic works. Creations covered by copyright range from books, music, paintings, sculptures, and films, to computer programs, databases, advertisements, etc. Copyright industries—whose primary purpose is to create, produce, distribute, or exhibit copyrighted materials—deliver significant value to society. Examples of WIPO classified industries within the copyright sector include sound recording studios, motion picture and video businesses, and software publishing firms. These firms are strong economic drivers because they provide a large workforce with higher-paying jobs than average and outpace other sectors in terms of growth and revenues (Siwek, 2014; U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 2016).
Within the copyright sector, software programming and publishing relies intensively on intellectual property protection, and is a major and growing part of the economy. In the U.S. alone, the software industry directly contributed $564.4 billion to the economy in 2016 (+18.7% over 2014) and employed 2.9 million people, an increase of more than 350,000 US jobs during the last two years. Moreover, for each direct job generated by the software industry, another 2.6 supporting jobs are created throughout the rest of the economy (BSA | The Software Alliance, 2017). The Spanish programming industry boasts proportionally slighter numbers, but remains of particular interest because Spain is the country where this study was conducted. Table 1 allows for a better understanding of the importance and contribution of the software programming industry to the Spanish economy in terms of revenues, size, and workforce (ONTSI, 2017).
Table 1.
Overview of the Spanish software programming industry
| Year |
| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 |
| Revenues (€ million) | 5,968 | 6,128 | 6,062 | 6,337 | 7,075 |
| Number of businesses | 1,414 | 1,594 | 1,845 | 2,221 | 2,574 |
| Number of employees | 24,784 | 24,314 | 25,162 | 28,360 | 32,152 |
Note. Adapted from the 2017 Annual Report on the IT, Communications, and Content Sector in Spain [Informe Annual del Sector de las Tecnologías de la Información, las Comunicaciones y de los Contenidos en España 2017] conducted by the Telecommunications and Information Society National Observatory [Observatorio Nacional de las Telecomunicaciones y de la SI], 2017.