reference library

As the America Invents Act (AIA) turns 10, patent students across the country may ask: if the law is already a decade old, why am I spending so much time…
Read more

This article presents a brief update through 2019 of the author’s previous quantitative study of all reported federal court opinions that applied the Copyright Act’s four-factor test for copyright fair…
Read more

The pharmaceutical industry is facing substantial criticism from many directions, including financial barriers to access to drugs in both developed and developing countries, high profits, spending on advertising and marketing,…
Read more

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…
Read more

This paper examines the U.S. government’s intramural research and development efforts over a 40-year period, drawing together multiple human capital, government spending, and patent datasets. The U.S. Federal Government innovates…
Read more

In 2004, Canada changed the eligibility rules for its Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SRED) tax credit, which provides tax incentives for R&D conducted by small private firms. Difference-in-difference estimates…
Read more

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…
Read more

This chapter provides an overview of grant funding as an innovation policy tool aimed at both practitioners and science policy scholars. We first discuss how grants relate to other contractual…
Read more

As yet another coronavirus spreads around the globe, scientists are once again trying to develop new treatments and vaccines. Much remains unknown about this family of viruses. But we know…
Read more

Successful innovation is essential for the survival and growth of organizations but how best to incentivize innovation is poorly understood. We compare how two common incentive schemes affect innovative performance…
Read more

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….
Read more

This paper exploits variation in the adoption of copyright laws – due to idiosyncratic variation in the timing of Napoléon’s military victories – to investigate the causal effects of copyright…
Read more

Forty years ago, Justice Stephen Breyer expressed serious doubts about the economic soundness of extending copyright protection to computer programs in his seminal article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright. A…
Read more

In recent years, there has been a growing push towards state legislation that would provide consumers with a “right to repair” their products. Currently 18 states have pending legislation that…
Read more

“The 2017 Edition reflects the following principal developments: Trade Secrets: Congress passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016, one of the most momentous changes in the history of trade…
Read more

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…
Read more

One of the great advantages of digital content has been that for the last forty years, people have had access to whatever content they want whenever they wanted it. That…
Read more

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…
Read more

Historically, and consistently, direct copyright infringement has been understood to be a strict liability tort. Unfortunately, some recent lower court decisions addressing infringement of copyrighted content on online platforms could…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more

This paper raises three issues on the relationship between intellectual property and inequality. The first is a simple logical point. Patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property are public…
Read more

We analyze how frivolous patent-infringement claims made by non-practicing entities (NPEs, or “patent trolls”) affect startups’ ability to grow and create jobs, innovate, and raise capital. Our identification strategy exploits…
Read more

“In a remarkably short time viewed in a historical context, the lives of billions of people worldwide have been transformed for the better through innovation and creativity. Intellectual property (IP)…
Read more

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…
Read more

As digital networks emerge as the dominant means of distributing copyrighted works, the first sale doctrine is increasingly marginalized. The limitations first sale places on the exclusive right of distribution…
Read more

Our aim is to highlight the benefits and limitations of open and non-anonymized peer review. Our argument is based on the literature and on responses to a survey on the…
Read more

This paper proposes a novel approach to measure disclosure in patent applications using algorithms from computational linguistics. Borrowing methods from the literature on second language acquisition, we analyze core linguistic…
Read more

This article first outlines the relevant fundamental rights as guaranteed under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention of Human Rights that are affected by an obligation…
Read more

This article provides a review of the role and functions of patents in society using data and evidence from the economic and management literature. While patents provide private protection to…
Read more

The requirement of nonobviousness, codified in 35 U.S.C. § 103, has been called “the ultimate condition of patentability” because of its crucial function of keeping technically trivial inventions out of…
Read more

Vaccinating the world’s population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more

“This study examines whether the conduct that the FTC challenged represented isolated instances or is more typical, and whether the 180-day exclusivity and the 30- month stay provisions of the…
Read more

When Spotify went public earlier this year, the company faced a $1.6 billion lawsuit alleging that it was streaming such hits as Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” the Doors’ “Light My…
Read more

There is widespread belief that the Patent Office issues too many bad patents that impose significant harms on society. At first glance, the solution to the patent quality crisis seems…
Read more

We study the matching of patent applications to examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Using test statistics originally developed to identify industry agglomeration, we find strong evidence that…
Read more

Despite much theoretical attention to the concept of procrastination and much exploration of this phenomenon in laboratory settings, there remain few empirical investigations into the practice of procrastination in real…
Read more

There is general agreement that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is issuing too many invalid patents that are unnecessarily reducing consumer welfare, stunting productive research, and discouraging innovation. In…
Read more

We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to…
Read more

Many believe the root cause of the patent system’s dysfunction is that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or Agency) is issuing too many invalid patents that unnecessarily drain…
Read more

Scholars have spilled much ink questioning patent quality. Complaints encompass concern about incoming applications, examination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”), and the USPTO’s ultimate output. The literature…
Read more

Intellectual property scholars have vigorously debated the merits of patents versus prizes for encouraging innovation, with occasional consideration of government grants. But these are not the only options. Perhaps most…
Read more

In recent years, problems with the U.S. patent system have garnered attention from scholars and policymakers of all types. Concerns about the competitiveness of U.S. industry undergird worries that the…
Read more

Patents and trade secrecy have long been considered substitute incentives for innovation. When inventors create a new invention, they traditionally must choose between the two. And if inventors choose to…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more

We propose a statutory safe harbor from the CFAA and DMCA §1201 for security research activities. Based on a responsible disclosure model in which a researcher and vendor engage in…
Read more

In this article we report on the results of an experiment we performed to determine whether transactions in intellectual property (IP) are subject to the valuation anomalies commonly referred to…
Read more

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…
Read more

Copyright has an innovation problem. Judicial decisions, private enforcement, and public dialogue ignore innovation and overemphasize the harms of copyright infringement. Just to pick one example, “piracy,” “theft,” and “rogue…
Read more

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“Federal Circuit”) has long relied on active appellate review to bring uniformity and clarity to patent law. It initially treated the PTO…
Read more

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…
Read more

The standard economic rationale for the alienability of property rights is that it facilitates the flow of resources to those who can put it to the most valuable use, or…
Read more

Debates over economic policy are often framed as conservatives supporting market-oriented policies, while progressives support government interventions. However, there are many market-oriented policies that can lead to more equality, an…
Read more

A “patent box” is a term for the application of a lower corporate tax rate to the income derived from the ownership of patents. This tax subsidy instrument has been…
Read more

Clothing designs can be beautiful. But they are also functional. Fashion’s dual nature sits uneasily in intellectual property law, and its treatment by copyright, trademark, and design patent laws has…
Read more

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…
Read more

Though a primary goal of intellectual property law is to promote creativity in technology and the arts, intellectual property doctrine pays remarkably little attention to psychology research on how to…
Read more

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…
Read more

In this Article, we offer both a legal and a pragmatic framework for defending against copyright trolls. Lawsuits alleging online copyright infringement by John Doe defendants have accounted for roughly…
Read more

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…
Read more

Have the Supreme Court’s recent patent eligibility cases changed the behavior of venture capital and private equity investment firms, and if so how? This Article provides empirical data about investors’…
Read more

This book chapter examines the relationship between intellectual property protection and economic development. It begins by exploring the conventional linkage between intellectual property protection and foreign direct investment. The chapter…
Read more

“Patent law is built upon a fundamental premise: only significant inventions receive patent protection while minor improvements remain in the public domain. This premise is indispensable for maintaining an optimal…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more

The paper investigates whether patent fees are an effective mechanism to deter the filing of low-quality patent applications. The study analyzes the effect on patent quality of the Patent Law…
Read more

Despite having put authors at the forefront of expansionary rhetoric for generations, copyright can’t seem to find a way of actually getting them paid. At the same time, current approaches…
Read more

Copyright was originally intended to serve creators as an engine of free expression, protecting them from the interference of others and from all risk of censorship. To this end, a…
Read more

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…
Read more

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;…
Read more

The Article proceeds as follows: Part II provides the necessary background with respect to the economic analysis of patent law in general and the economic analysis of cumulative innovation in…
Read more

“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…
Read more

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…
Read more

This Article explores how copyright law addressed the issue of innocent infringement in its early years. Part I discusses how copyright law, from its beginnings in England in 1709 and…
Read more

Suing actual infringers is passe in copyright law. In the digital environment, the real stakes lie in suing those who facilitate infringement by others. There is of course a good…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more

This Article analyzes divergences in decisionmaking trends while examiners undergo the Signatory Authority Review Program (the “Program”). The Program is the process by which examiners are promoted to the position…
Read more

The optimal term of copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. Based on a novel approach we derive an explicit formula which characterises the optimal…
Read more

We found that these local governments are imposing discretionary review processes on all residential development projects of five or more units within their borders. [W]hat drives whether and how environmental…
Read more

According to the economic theory of patents, patents are needed so that pioneer firm have time to recoup their sunk costs of research and development. The key element in the…
Read more

This paper reviews the economic case for patents and the potential for differential pricing to increase affordability of on-patent drugs in developing countries while preserving incentives for innovation. Differential pricing,…
Read more

The U.S. patent system has long depended on trials before lay judges and lay juries for adjudicating patent disputes. Many think that reliance on lay judges and juries is a…
Read more

This paper examines the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation. Recent evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on…
Read more

It may be advantageous to provide a variety of kinds of patent protection to heterogenous innovations. Innovations which benefit society largely through their use as building blocks to future inventions…
Read more

The paper seeks to understand the impact of the patent system on innovation by examining shifts in the strength of patent protection across sixty countries and a 150-year period. An…
Read more

The vast majority of books [Google is publishing online] belong to a third category: still protected by copyright, or of uncertain status, and out of print. These books are at…
Read more

Since 2003, EFF has championed an alternative approach that gets artists paid while making file sharing legal: voluntary collective licensing. The concept is simple: the music industry forms several “collecting…
Read more

[M]ost copyrighted works have a short commercial life. Only a tiny fraction of books, songs, movies, and software are so successful that they enjoy multiple printings and continue to sell…
Read more

On September 8, 2003, the recording industry sued 261 American music fans for sharing songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, kicking off an unprecedented legal campaign against the people…
Read more

Why do firms in some industries ignore patents when developing new products? This paper posits a simple answer to this long puzzling question: firms ignore patents because they are unable…
Read more

This wasn’t the first time the DMCA had interfered with my security research. Back in 2001, my colleagues and I had had to withdraw a peer-reviewed paper about CD copy…
Read more

This article presents an econometric analysis of the direct effects of the R&D tax credit (RTC) on private R&D investment and capital in France and proposes an ex ante evaluation…
Read more

Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of…
Read more

In most areas of the law, we try to avoid this kind of unfairness [in payouts from civil litigation] and uncertainty by making sure that we tie penalties to the…
Read more

We examine the impact of loss of U.S. patent exclusivity (LOE) on the prices and utilization of specialty drugs between 2001 and 2007. We limit our empirical cohort to drugs…
Read more