Intellectual Property: Ten Things You Need to Read

Intellectual Property: Ten Things You Need to Read2018-06-05T21:13:54-07:00

1. Direct cost to defendants of patent infringement litigation by “nonperforming entities” (NPEs), also known as “patent trolls,” estimated at $29 billion in 2011.

James E. Bessen and Michael J. Meurer, “Direct Costs from NPE Disputes,” Cornell Law Review, January 2014.

 

2. If patents incentivize innovation, why did stronger patent protection for software result in reduced R&D intensity?

James E. Bessen and Robert M. Hunt, “An Empirical Look at Software Patents,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, April 1, 2004.

 

3. How patents can discourage innovation in the context of “sequential innovation.”

James E. Bessen and Eric Maskin, “Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Innovation,” RAND Journal of Economics, Winter 2009.

 

4. Shows why the case for patents is a lot weaker than most people think.

Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, “The Case against Patents,” Journal of Economic Perspective, Winter 2013.

 

5. How many times have you unwittingly infringed copyright law today?

John Tehranian, “Infringement Nation,” Utah Law Review, November 25, 2007.

 

6. The case against copyright law.

Tom W. Bell, “Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good,” The Mercatus Center, 2014.

 

7. Good summary of copyright law’s expansion in response to digital copying.

Timothy B. Lee, “Copyright Enforcement and the Internet: we just haven’t tried hard enough?Ars Technica, February 14, 2012.

 

8. Does repairing your car violate copyright law? The long reach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention provisions.

Jason Koebler, “The US Government Wants to Permanently Legalize the Right to Repair,” Motherboard, June 22, 2017.

 

9. How the Digital Millennium Copyright Act undermines online security.

Edward Felten, “Chilling Effects of the DMCA,” Slate, March 29, 2013.

 

10. How copyright forced “the progress of the science and useful arts” onto the Dark Web.

Kaveh Waddell, “Research Pirates of the Dark Web,” The Atlantic, February 9, 2016.