This paper aims to address two questions: first, how to identify the legal standard that courts use to assess a specific behavior (software integration) commonly adopted by firms possessing IPRs. Second, whether this standard enables us, on the one hand, to draw a line between predatory and...

This paper uses a sample of 71 countries in a cross-country context to empirically analyze the relationship between income distribution and software piracy rates. It measures income inequality by the Gini coefficient and alternatively by quintile shares. This analysis remedies previous...

The rise of commerce over the Internet and telephone has led to widespread use of "pay now, terms later" or "rolling" standard form contracts, in which buyers are not able to read the standard terms until after they have purchased the product. While some scholars and judges argue that rolling...

Most commercial transactions are governed by standard form contracts. But despite the ubiquity of standard forms, there has been little empirical study of their content and determinants. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of 647 software license agreements, paying special attention to...

We use a Hotelling linear city model to study competition between open source and proprietary software, where only the producer of the proprietary software aims at maximizing the profit. The producer of the proprietary software must decide on compatibility. Different compatibility strategies...

The debate over whether software is appropriate subject matter for patent protection continues to rage, without any clear resolution in sight. The European Patent Convention attempts to draw this distinction by excluding software programs from patent protection unless they have a 'technical...

Researchers in the area of information security have mainly been concerned with tools, techniques and policies that firms can use to protect themselves against security breaches. However, information security is as much about security software as it is about secure software. Software is not...

Open source software is increasingly used in mission-critical processes of organizations, signaling its acceptance as highly reliable software. That said, the development process in open source communities differs radically from conventional approaches to reliable software development. Stronger...

We present a model of fixing or patching a software problem after the product has been released in the market. Specifically, we model a software firm's trade-off in releasing a buggy product early and investments in fixing it later. Just as the marginal cost of producing software can be...