There is no historical precedent that I know of to justify the case that intellectual property promotes growth. In fact I strongly believe otherwise.
This is an unfalsifiable statement because I have no idea what might be an historical example which could demonstrate how "intellectural property" promotes growth, what that growth may or may not be, or even or even what exactly it is that you are talking about by "intellectual property" as if some thought pattern in the neural cortex of a brain can possibly be "owned" in an exclusive manner.
As such, it may be a belief as in "I believe in the flying spaghetti monster that when it arrives from the Andromeda Galaxy it will eliminate all universal hunger." It may even be a firm belief, but it is grounded on nothing at all.
If you may, however, I'll try to define some of these terms. In particular this main thread is talking about copyright law, so if we stick with "copyright law" as opposed to "intellectual property" we might be able to somewhat narrow the focus of this statement a fair bit. I am also going to define perhaps "growth" relating to the number of new books published over a regular time interval with those works available for anybody to be able to read or view, furthermore defining those as books which have been mass-produced in quantities greater than two. Hand-written journals and a single copy for personal enjoyment don't count... this is something written by an author with at least the strong intention that more than one other person is expected to be able to read the thing other than that original author.
I'll also furthermore define a specific time frame to look for historical examples, and will put that at the invention of the printing press with Johannes Gutenberg starting at roughly the years between 1400-1500 A.D. and continuing to the present day. Prior to the development of the printing press the value of a book was mainly in the transcription of that book so the book itself was considered in and of itself to be a valued and treasured item that would be more akin to "real property" as opposed to "intellectual property". In the year 1000 A.D., if you owned a "library" of more than one book (or even simply had a book at all) you would be considered quite wealthy as the production of something like the Christian Bible represented about a year's worth of labor or more. Copying the contents of books was more like worries over trade secrets rather than encouraging somebody to create the written content in the first place. People copying the Bible was actually illegal because the priests of the era didn't want ordinary "lay people" to find their "secrets". A great many people including William Tyndale literally gave their lives simply for copying the Bible, and in that sense is the foundation of free speech laws and constitutional amendments to make sure their lives weren't lost in vain.
I should also note that like the creation of the internet, the printing press was an incredibly disruptive technology. Somebody copying something like the Bible or heaven forbid as William Tyndale did to even "translate" that text into such a vulgar language like English was simply unheard of. And then as Tyndale did to furthermore mass-produce that text at great personal cost (it ultimately cost him his life) and see to it that it was distributed to as many people as possible. As a side note, much of the "King James Version" of the Bible is derived from the original translation by Tyndale. His contribution to world culture certainly was quite significant.
Getting back to this growth issue, there certainly were a substantial number of books produced before copyright law was even enacted. The first law covering English language texts was called the
"Statute of Anne", passed in 1707. Interestingly, this was created by what amounted to be a trade guild for printers in London called the "Stationers' Company" and set up a legal situation where only members of this guild were permitted to publish anything at all. All other printing presses by non-guild members were to be destroyed along with whatever they printed, and money earned from that activity to be confiscated (and kept by the British crown). Let's just say that this was seen as incredibly draconian and it was something that also impacted people in North America as well because it made publication of the Bible by anybody other than a London printing house to also be illegal. Ben Franklin might have pushed boundaries hard for much of what he did, but that was one line he didn't cross until well after the American Revolution happened. The monopoly was eventually relaxed, but copyright law was at this point firmly established as a principle about this time... in response to the printing press.
Basically, the assertion here is if copyright law has any sort of encouragement role for authors to publish their works. I suppose I can give a personal testimony to the fact that I do consider it to be an incentive for myself, and I know of others who would consider it to be so. Still, let's stick to objective facts:
We do know from registration records from the Library of Congress that the number of publications since its creation has shown exponential growth in terms almost every possible metric that can be used for measurement. This can be in terms of the number of authors registering their works, the number of titles produced, the number of different subjects covered by those titles, the kinds of media used to create published works, and the physical size of the library itself. Even now the "Library of Congress" is currently used as a standard in the information technology field representing perhaps the sum total largest possible amount of data that is currently being used and exchanged on a regular basis, where holding a "LoC" of data is considered perhaps a holy grail for data storage specialists. The data would be counted in terms of how many letters there are in all of the books in the library together with digitized versions of all of the illustrations combined as a whole, or digitized versions of all other reproducible works of art. It represents a substantial amount of data and is something which can certainly be approximated to within an order of magnitude or so in terms of how much material that library has and how that information in the form of books has been received by the library over time. Records at the library have historical information going back to the establishment of the library by Thomas Jefferson, in terms of when the books were first published and when they were received by the library.
The problem here is that any sort of conclusions drawn from the statistical database made up of depository records at the Library of Congress depends upon a great many variables including population growth, technological changes, changes in legislation, and a great many other factors that unfortunately doesn't offer a control group to effectively compare the growth and creation of content under copyright law vs. growth that would have occurred without it. Registration happens with the Library of Congress explicitly because of copyright law, as at least in America all publishers are required to "donate" a book or other media to the library in exchange for copyright protection. That also accounts for its size as well.
The main problem is that there is no "control group" to be able to make a fair comparison as to how much content is produced in a place that lacks copyright law and someplace else of a similar demographic nature which has a strong copyright law. However it can be pointed out that there has been growth of reproducible works of art including books while there has been a copyright law in effect, that copyright term lengths don't seem to have a major impact on the number of works created or the growth of that creation either. This can be and is in fact used by proponents of strong copyright laws and longer copyright terms. I tried to use examples of Chinese and Russian copyright as an exception, but the largest problem there is that both countries have copyright law and have had it for nearly a century each as well making any sort of comparison mainly over copyright term lengths rather than the existence or lack thereof for copyright law itself.
In this sense the only even remote control group is during the brief period of time from when the printing press was created until most countries adopted copyright law. That there certainly were people willing to publish books and to do so at a profit without copyright law in effect can certainly be seen.
The only other possible sources of comparison that I can think of then would be with computer software titles in some sort of overall survey in terms of the various economic models being used for software distribution. It may be possible to dig up the number of titles that have been produced with either a pure proprietary license, those which have been simply placed into the public domain, and then comparing other sorts of "copyleft", non-commercial only, and perhaps "shareware" titles as well. This gets back to the argument of "copyleft" vs. "copyfree" and based upon my experience I would dare say that those works which have been placed directly into the public domain haven't seen nearly as much growth as the other kinds of software distribution methods. Furthermore, "copyleft" has been certainly outstripping "non-commercial only" licenses at a much faster and higher growth rate from many objective measures. In terms of the number of titles or even the number of "copies" shipped of "copyleft" as opposed to a "pure proprietary" licensed software, I would say that my gut feeling is that they are roughly the same at the moment. Proprietary licensed copyrighted content (like say Microsoft Windows and Adobe Photoshop) still dominate the marketplace, although the measurement metrics are not really fair comparisons even here.
About the only objective measurement I've seen of this is to take a very active website and count up the various kind of web browsers which include operating system data and do a comparison of each browser with the assumption that each unique IP address represents a different person. One place to look at for some of these statistics can be made here:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp Since presumably the servers themselves are agnostic in terms of what browser or operating system is being used, it provides a sort of apples to apples measurement in terms of what might be the relative "market strength" of each kind of software and how far have the ideas penetrated. "copyleft" software has certainly shown a strong showing and in fact rank as the top kind of licensing model, considering that Firefox represents the current largest number of browsers on the internet and Apache usually running on Linux represents by far the largest number of servers. In terms of the operating system of the browsers, it is by far and away held by Microsoft, although Linux and the Macintosh operating systems certainly seem to be holding their own. Nowhere to be found here is any sort of "public domain" software in any of these statistics or anything that might be close to the definition of "copyfree", so the question I would raise is "why is that?"
Copyleft software, at least by these numbers, is shown to be a viable distribution model that people will support both for development purposes and for those actually using the software once it is created. The ability to create works and simply "give them away" and to put them into the public domain has also been around for about the same length of time, yet it hasn't been nearly as "successful" in terms of adoption and growth in the market place. At the same time, a straight out "all rights reserved" and commercial content distribution model has also been very successful in terms of actually getting the software to ordinary end-users and providing the quality of software that they are needing. My question would then be to point out how perhaps "copyfree" might do that job better. If not, it is going to be a mime that will die. Where is the growth that comes from abandoning copyright altogether?
