Understanding the Effects of the U.S. Stress Tests
The macroprudential elements of the stress tests arise from: the scenario design, which is set to vary over time with the economic and financial cycles; the requirement to hold portfolios [...]
Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research
The “tragedy of the commons” metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an “anticommons” [...]
The Photographer’s Copyright – Photograph as Art, Photograph as Database
This Article explores the interaction between copyright law and photography, the 19th century technological development that most challenged copyright’s conceptual underpinnings. Prior to this article, neither courts nor commentators have [...]
Expired Patents
This article presents a comprehensive empirical description of the public domain of technologies that have recently passed out of patent protection. From a new dataset of over 300,000 patents that [...]
Traditional Knowledge, Cultural Expression, and the Siren’s Call of Property
This paper was presented at a symposium at the University of San Diego in 2012. After providing a brief historical review of international efforts to establish intellectual property rights over [...]
Meeting the Washington Region’s Future Housing Needs
Inaction on housing affordability challenges could ultimately undermine the region’s future economic growth and prosperity. Housing challenges like these can undermine worker productivity, make it harder for companies to attract [...]
Ambiguity Attitudes, Leverage Cycle and Asset Prices
Financial crises often originate in debt markets, where collateral constraints and opacity of asset values generate intrinsic instability. In such ambiguous contexts endogenous beliefs formation plays a crucial role in [...]
Understanding (and Fixing) the Right of Fixation in Copyright Law
In 1994, the United States established laws prohibiting the making and distribution of “bootleg” recordings of live music concerts. While strongly criticized by many commentators, these provisions establishing a “right [...]
The Copyright Divide
Most recently, the recording industry filed 261 lawsuits against individuals who illegally downloaded and distributed a large amount of music via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, such as KaZaA, Grokster, iMesh, and [...]
Motion Pictures, Markets, and Copylocks
This article discusses what has arguably been the world’s greatest naturally occurring experiment in cultural production without copyright: the burgeoning audiovisual industry of Nigeria, aka “Nollywood.” Although Nigeria has a [...]