Are strong IP rights good for the public domain? Or: Order Despite Law

Boalt's Professor Robert Merges has published an interesting article which is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review. In the article, he argues that the the current IP expansion is compensated at least to some extent by the enlargement of the public domain by private actors (such as investments by pharmaceutical firms in public domain gene sequences, by IBM in open source software, and by the adoption of Creative Commons by content creators). Although Professor Merges does not go that far, and one should be very careful not to misread his article as a statement of a "property extremist" (which he is not), a provocative question originating from his discussion would be: should copyright be expanded so that the Creative Commons licenses which are issued by creators have a higher value? Although this may sound odd and the answer is probably "no", it just highlights that the equation "IP expansion = necessarily bad" is not an easy one and still needs a lot of theoretical groundwork to be done both by the legal and economic scholarship.