Economists define “efficient markets” as markets where information is evenly distributed among all the buyers and sellers in the space. Efficiency is generally held to be a universal goal for any economy—unless the economy happens to traffic in ideas. If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to profit from their innovations, because their competitors would immediately adopt them. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we’ve
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