Prophetic Patents
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 [...]
This Week in Intellectual Property, June 17th
News and Commentary The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act would establish a small-claims court in the U.S. Copyright Office as an alternative for traditional copyright infringement claims. While [...]
Copyright and Creativity: Evidence from Italian Operas
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 [...]
This Week in Intellectual Property, June 10th
News and Commentary The first two of three hearings on the Tillis/Coons Section 101 reform were held last week. You can see the first hearing here, and the second here. [...]
The Paradoxes of Patenting: Invention and Its Diffusion in 18th- and 19th-Century Britain, France, and North America
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 [...]
Appropriating the Returns from Industrial Research and Development
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 [...]
The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic Growth
A defining feature of modern economic growth is the systematic application of science to advance technology. However, despite sustained progress in scientific knowledge, recent productivity growth in the U.S. has [...]
Trends in Prices of Popular Brand-Name Prescription Drugs in the United States
High and continually increasing pharmaceutical drug spending is a major health and health policy concern in the United States.This economic evaluation of drug prices focuses on 49 top-selling brand-name medications [...]
Gene Patents and Licensing Practices and Their Impact on Patient Access to Genetic Tests
In keeping with our mandate to provide advice on the broad range of policy issues raised by the development and use of genetic technologies as well as our charge to [...]
The Uneasy Case for Software Copyrights Revisited
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 [...]