reference library

Intellectual property (IP) conflict of laws issues in disputes between private parties arise for a variety of reasons. Most infringe the plaintiff’s intellectual property rights in countries X, Y, and…
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In this paper we analyse whether firms that are concerned with corporate social responsibility (CSR) are willing to disclose their R&D knowledge for free. Assuming strategic R&D with endogenous spillovers…
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A pandemic calls for large-scale action across national and international innovation systems in order to mobilize resources for developing and manufacturing crisis-critical products efficiently and in the huge quantities needed….
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The importance of new technologies derives from the fact that they spread across many different users and uses, as well as different geographic regions. The diffusion of technological improvements, across…
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Copyright law, which promotes the creation of cultural and artistic works by protecting these works from being copied, excuses infringement that is deemed to be a fair use. Whether an…
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This paper studies how insurance coverage policies affect incentives for pharmaceutical innovation. In the United States, the majority of drugs are sold to Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), which administer prescription…
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Delays in market entry of generic drugs are common. This study sought to identify the prevalence of delayed entry, the reasons for the delays, and the delays’ effects on Medicaid…
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Recently, state governments have begun to claim a copyright interest in their official published codes of law, in particular arguing that ancillary materials such as annotations to the statutory text…
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Many economics journals have recently invested in efforts to archive and curate research data and promote reproducible research. The economics profession has focused relatively less attention on what types of…
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Ten years ago, donors committed $1.5 billion to a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) to help purchase pneumococcal vaccine for low-income countries. The AMC aimed to encourage the development of…
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Innovation is important for firm performance and broader economic growth. But breakthrough innovations necessarily require greater risk-taking than more incremental approaches. To understand how managers respond to uncertainty when making…
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Social and policy interest in intellectual property, and patents, in particular, is growing. This is reflected in the rise of scholarly inquiry on the topic beyond the legal community, including…
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The negotiations of the Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) (2006-2008), undertaken by the Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO), were the result…
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In four cases handed down between 2010 and 2014, the Supreme Court articulated a new two-step patent eligibility test that drastically reduced the scope of patent protection for software inventions….
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In most contexts, making up data is forbidden – considered fraudulent, even immoral. Not so in patents. Patents often contain experimental data, and it is perfectly acceptable for these experiments…
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This article deals with a period of transition for most patent systems in Europe and North America, from instruments of royal prerogative power to specialized and statute-based weapons of capitalist…
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This paper describes the results of an inquiry into appropriability conditions in more than one hundred manufacturing industries. We discuss how this information has been and might be used to…
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We study reward-based crowdfunding campaigns, a new class of dynamic contribution games where consumption is exclusive. Two types of backers participate: buyers want to consume the product while donors just…
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On August 11, 2020, the Ninth Circuit handed down its opinion in Federal Trade Commission v. Qualcomm Inc., reversing the district court’s judgment in favor of the FTC. This essay…
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Intellectual Property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college…
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Many regulatory agency employees are hired by the firms they regulate, creating a “revolving door” between government and the private sector. We study these transitions using detailed data from the…
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Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or “patent racing,” has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically. This article introduces an empirical way to identify…
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Scholarly work seeking to understand academics’ commercial activities often draws on abstract notions of the institution of science and of the representative scientist. Few scholars have examined whether and how…
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In a recent study, The Perryman Group (TPG), a world-renowned group of economists widely used and respected by industry and government, measured the effect of the AIA and PTAB on…
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Do information differences across US physicians contribute to treatment disparities? This paper uses a unique new dataset to evaluate how changes in physician access to a decision-relevant drug database affect…
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“We analyze the role that the launch of new drugs has played in reducing the number of years of life lost (YLL) before 3 different ages (85, 70, and 55)…
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Patent law is virtually alone in intellectual property (IP) in punishing independent development. To infringe a copyright or trade secret, defendants must copy the protected IP from the plaintiff, directly…
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We show that examiner-driven variation in patent rights leads to quantitatively large impacts on several patent outcomes, including patent value, citations, and litigation. Notably, Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) overwhelmingly purchase…
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The current reliance on patent monopolies is due to the fact that the system is a surviving legacy of the feudal guild system, it is not the result of economic…
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The United States government is taking a targeted, practical, and comprehensive approach toward addressing intellectual property policy and strategy. The goal is to ensure a level playing field for American…
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A large number of countries around the world now provide some kind of tax incentive to encourage firms to undertake innovative activity. This paper presents the policy rationale for these…
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This symposium piece first seeks to unpack the relationship between intellectual property infringement and property offenses, and then to understand how the connection between the two has informed when the…
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The present study examines the importance of Schumpeterian profits in the United States economy. Schumpeterian profits are defined as those profits that arise when firms are able to appropriate the…
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We begin this paper by tracing the growth of the venture capital industry over the past 40 years, noting how technological and institutional changes have narrowed the focus and concentrated…
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Patent holdup has proven one of the most controversial topics in innovation policy, in part because companies with a vested interest in denying its existence have spent tens of millions…
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Patent law’s doctrine of ineligible subject matter is widely agreed to be in a bad state of repair. Even those welcoming the Supreme Court’s return to express subject-matter bars have…
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Whether behavior relating to a patent thicket presents an antitrust issue is a nuanced question. But a recent ruling involving the biologic Humira shows how not to decide these issues….
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Machine learning requires the copying of extraordinary amounts of copyrighted material. That copying should generally be permitted. Most ML systems copy works not to consume the expression copyright law protects,…
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Patent expiration is a consequential event for not only the drug undergoing patent expiration, but also the therapeutic class in which the drug is contained. Market dynamics change significantly for…
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One of the key recommendations of the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine is to take a societal perspective when evaluating new technologies—including measuring the productivity benefits of…
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This chapter explores the interplay of intellectual property and social justice. Part I constructs a philosophical framework for thinking about the many cross-currents between intellectual property and social justice. Part…
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The ‘quality’ of novel technological innovations is extremely variable, and the ability to measure innovation quality is essential to sensible, evidence-based policy. Patents, an often vital precursor to a commercialised…
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When judges change the legal rules governing patents, those changes are always retroactive. That is, they apply equally to patents that have already been granted and patents that do not…
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This article explores whether authors can dedicate their copyright to the public domain. Such dedications are becoming increasingly relevant as authors now see the expansion of the public domain as…
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Biologics accounted for roughly $145 billion in spending in 2018 (IQVIA, 2019). They are also the fastest growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry. The Biological Price Competition and Innovation Act…
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“This essay examines patent abandonment rates and application rates to determine if they can shed light on how the Covid-19 pandemic affected innovation. While the results show temporary perturbations, the…
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The provisions at issue in the draft Restatement of Copyright Law on which ALI membership will vote at ALI’s upcoming annual meeting are central to copyright doctrine and have been…
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The purpose of this white paper is to provide background and guidance to Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member libraries in the United States that wish to reconsider interlibrary loan…
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If a litigated patent has previously been licensed to a third party, the courts generally adopt the terms of the prior agreement as the best measure of damages. However, while…
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This project provides the first comprehensive empirical study of copyright registrations and renewals over the entire scope of American History since the Constitution. Previous pieces began the process of answering…
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Continuations allow inventors to claim technology developed after the original filing date of their patent, leading to concerns about inadvertent infringement and hold-up. We use the link between patents and…
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IP rights have come under attack from a loose coalition of academics, nongovernmental organizations, multilateral groups, and others whose opposition threatens to undermine innovation, growth, and progress on key global…
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The goal of antitrust policy is to protect and promote a vigorous competitive process. Effective rivalry spurs firms to introduce new and innovative products, as they seek to capture profitable…
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The goal of science is to advance knowledge, yet little is known about its value for marketplace inventions. While important breakthrough technologies could not have been developed without scientific background,…
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Research and development in software contributes to emerging research, investment, and economic policy areas, such as artificial intelligence, information and communication technologies (ICT), and the digital economy. Accordingly, software R&D…
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Effective dispute resolution is important for reducing private and social costs. We study how resolution responds to changes in price and communication using a new, extensive data set of copyright…
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This paper evaluates the ability of “forced technology transfer” (FTT) policies – i.e., policies meant to increase foreign-domestic technology transfer that simultaneously weaken appropriability of foreign innovations – to contribute…
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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”…
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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…
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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…
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The patent statute creates a general set of legal rules that govern a wide variety of technologies. With only a few exceptions, the statute does not distinguish between different technologies…
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Controversies often arise at the interfaces where intellectual property (“IP”) law meets other topics in law and economics, such as property law, contract law, and antitrust law. Participants in the…
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Creativity is universally agreed to be a good that copyright law should seek to promote, yet copyright scholarship and policymaking have proceeded largely on the basis of assumptions about what…
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Digital technologies for sharing creative goods create new opportunities for copyright infringement and challenge established enforcement methods. We establish several important facts about the nature of copyright infringement and efforts…
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Copyright infringement may result from frictions preventing legal consumption, but may also reveal demand. Motivated by this fact, we run a field experiment in which we contact firms that are…
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Copyright law provides an excellent case study with which to study and evaluate Harold Demsetz’s theory of property rights. Regardless of how one feels about the relationship between property and…
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This paper examines how intellectual property rights (IPR) protection affects innovation and foreign direct investment (FDI) using a North–South quality-ladder model incorporating the exogenous and costless imitation of technology and…
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During World War II, the U.S. government launched an unprecedented effort to mobilize science for war: the newly-established Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) entered thousands of R&D contracts…
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Innovation increasingly relies on scientific knowledge. Research to generate that knowledge has historically been funded by both industry and government. Although industry and government research spending was relatively equal in…
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There is growing concern that dominant companies use patents strategically to keep competitors from entering their market. This column uses the landmark 1956 Consent Decree against Bell Labs to explore…
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One’s view of the patent system depends on what perspective is taken. A narrow focus on the operational level of doctrinal implementation of patent law reveals significant instability and fluctuation…
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Digitization has reached things. This shift promises to alter the business and legal landscape for a range of industries. Digitization has already disrupted copyright-based industries and laws. As cost barriers…
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In this paper, we offer an economic perspective on one aspect of the IP-antitrust nexus – the ability of firms to use their IP portfolios to compete with rivals. We…
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While patent systems have been widely used both historically and internationally, there is nonetheless a tremendous amount of controversy over whether patent systems – in practice – improve the alignment…
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In this paper we raise questions concerning the widely accepted proposition that economic efficiency requires that copyright protection be limited in its duration (often shorter than the current term). We…
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We develop a structural model to investigate the effects of pharmaceutical price regulation on demand and on manufacturers’ price-setting behavior in France. We estimate price-cost margins in a regulated market…
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Intellectual property is a critical driver of economic prosperity. But there is a serious problem that our government needs to address to enhance the protection of IP and, thereby, to…
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We use textual analysis of high-dimensional data from patent documents to create new indicators of technological innovation. We identify significant patents based on textual similarity of a given patent to…
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Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing patent rights by court invalidation on subsequent research…
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Patents are increasingly swept up into the operations of agencies in the modern administrative state. This has raised anew the fundamental question whether patents are private property rights or special…
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Global flows of foreign direct investment fell by 23 per cent in 2017. Cross-border investment in developed and transition economies dropped sharply, while growth was near zero in developing economies….
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I investigate whether the types of cancer (breast, colon, lung, etc.) subject to greater penetration of new ideas had larger subsequent survival gains and mortality reductions, controlling for changing incidence….
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This paper studies the effects of the USPTO’s patent secrecy program in World War II, under which approximately 11,200 U.S. patent applications were issued secrecy orders which halted examination and…
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We provide evidence on the value of patents to startups by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of applications to examiners with different propensities to grant patents. Using unique data on all…
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In previous work, I wrote about how trade secrecy drives the plot of Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, explaining how the Oompa-Loompas are the ideal solution to…
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We investigate the impact of reporting regulation on corporate innovation activity. Exploiting thresholds in Europe’s regulation and a major enforcement reform in Germany, we find that forcing a greater share…
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This paper documents that corporate R&D investment increases employee departures to entrepreneurship. We use U.S. Census data, and instrument for R&D with its tax credit-induced cost. The ideas or skills…
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Underlying many contemporary discussions of intellectual product regulation are two implicit economic models: one having to do with primary resource allocation, and one having to do with both allocative effects…
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In this paper we scrutinize the moral case for copyright and patent laws and find it wanting. “Intellectual property” is a misleading description of those laws in their current form;…
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Artists have always loved to hate the art market. They want to sell their work, but only on their own terms. Unfortunately, they usually lack the means to explain what…
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“Since the late 1980s, the Chinese economy has been growing at an enviable average annual rate of about 10 per cent. Accompanying this unprecedented economic development and growth was the…
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We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms,…
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Do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We study Italian firms and their workers to answer this question. Our analysis uses a brand-new dataset, spanning the period…
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This paper examines how intellectual property rights (IPR) protection affects innovation and foreign direct investment (FDI) using a North–South quality-ladder model incorporating the exogenous and costless imitation of technology and…
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The high-tech sector is increasingly concentrated in a small number of expensive cities, with the top ten cities in “Computer Science”, “Semiconductors” and “Biology and Chemistry”, accounting for 70%, 79%…
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I begin, in Part I, by showing that Aquinas’ just price resembles the price emerging from voluntary exchange rather than a regulated price resulting from involuntary exchange, such as compulsory…
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Why should a property interest exist in an intangible item? In recent years, arguments over intellectual property have often divided proponents – who emphasize the importance of providing incentives for…
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Digital crowdfunding platforms that raise money directly from citizens have created an alternative source of research funding. This column analyses data from the largest science crowdfunding platform, Experiment.com. It finds…
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This paper studies the effects of the USPTO’s patent secrecy program in World War II, under which approximately 11,200 U.S. patent applications were issued secrecy orders which halted examination and…
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This paper provides evidence that risk aversion leads pharmaceutical firms to underinvest in radical innovation. We define a drug candidate as novel if it is molecularly distinct from prior candidates….
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