Policy Levers in Patent Law
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 [...]
The Basics Matter: At the Periphery of Intellectual Property
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 [...]
Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory
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 [...]
Copyright Infringement in the Market for Digital Images
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 [...]
Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment
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 [...]
Evaluating the Demsetzian Trend in Copyright Law
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 [...]
Intellectual Property Rights and Foreign Direct Investment: A Welfare Analysis
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 [...]
Inventing the Endless Frontier: The Effects of the World War II Research Effort on Post-war Innovation
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 [...]
Government-Funded Research Increasingly Fuels Innovation
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 [...]
How antitrust enforcement can spur innovation: Bell Labs and the 1956 Consent Decree
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 [...]