No one ever argues for copyright on the grounds that superstar artists and authors need more money, but what if that is all, or mostly all, that copyright does? This article presents newly available data on the distribution of players across the PC videogame market. This data reveals an L-shaped...

In 1841, Lord Babington described copyright “as a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers.” In this article, I take that description literally. Treating copyright as a tax-and-subsidy system, I use a novel data set to estimate the amount of the copyright tax and to...

Today, we have a two-tiered trademark system. In the top tier, both parties can afford to litigate. In the lower tier, only one party can. This two-tiered system has arisen over the last century because courts refused to follow the law. Faced with trademark law that led to seemingly unjust...

In copyright, we are guided by a simple intuition: More revenue leads to more original works. But the relationship between revenue and creative output is not so simple. Broadening copyright in order to increase the revenue associated with any given work may ensure the expected profitability, and...

Over the last twenty years, arguments for broader copyright have taken an increasingly mercantilist turn. Rather than argue for broader copyright in terms of more or better original works, proponents have begun arguing for broader copyright on the basis of revenue and jobs. Consumer copying is...

Over the last twenty years, a quiet revolution has taken place in patent law. Before 1982, courts rigorously enforced the nonobviousness requirement, limiting patents to those innovations representing a substantial technical advance. At the same time, once an innovation satisfied this rigorous...

In 1984, by the margin of a single vote, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc. that the home-taping of a copyrighted television broadcast for purposes of time-shifting constituted a fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976. Since that time,...

In the Uruguay Round, negotiators for the United States persuaded its trading partners to incorporate uniform minimum standards for the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) directly into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. This paper addresses the question whether the...