Rents, in the economic sense, are above-normal profits that are usually attributed to some unfair market structure, often made possible through regressive regulations. In the case of copyright, there is [...]
News and Commentary Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee marked up the "No Combination Drug Patents Act", aimed at rolling back drug "evergreening." Drug companies will often tinker with already [...]
News and Commentary James Stansel of PhRMA penned an opposing view in USA Today on the importance of patents to the pharmaceutical industry. It's rather uninspired, and only goes through [...]
Rent Check The figures the Trump Administration is relying on when calculating the costs of Chinese IP "theft" are based on some fuzzy math, even when the administration can cite [...]
The current trade war is based on a number of fundamental misunderstandings about the positive-sum nature of international trade and the costs of protectionism. In one relatively minor but characteristically [...]
Rent Check Trade secrets are an alternative to patenting, but they come at the cost of the various protections that the government gives to patent holders. Or perhaps not. Jeanne [...]
News and Commentary Kerry Maeve Sheehan of the Author's Alliance has a post detailing the problems with the CASE Act, which would create a small-claims court for copyright claims. While [...]
A forthcoming article in the NYU Law Review by Jeanne C. Fromer argues that the software industry is increasingly turning to trade secret protections: With secrecy becoming more robust for [...]
A new article published in Science examines the growing role of public funding in driving innovation: Innovation increasingly relies on scientific knowledge. Research to generate that knowledge has historically been funded [...]
News and Commentary An article published in Discover magazine discusses the research of Janet Freilich and the problem of "prophetic patents." These patents are for inventions that don't exist yet, some [...]