This Review Essay will appear in the Journal of Economic Literature. It covers two books: The Democratization of Innovation by Zorina Khan, and Knut Blind, et al., Software Patents. The Khan book argues that a wise intellectual property policy - in particular, a highly "democratic" legal order...

We analyze the characteristics of the patents held by firms in the software industry. Unlike prior researchers, we rely on examination of the individual patents to determine which patents involve software inventions. This method of identifying the relevant patents is more laborious than the...

One hundred thousand software patents are in force today, yet nobody really knows what is covered or by whom. But patents on computer software are so obscure to be effectively secret - they are abstrusely written, not indexed in any meaningful way, and their scope is hard to predict. Because the...

For lack of our imagination, this article does not have the most scintillating title. However, the subject matter is critically important. We survey prominent kinds of disclosures in law and show why the disclosure tool, though subject to substantial criticism, is central to the legitimacy of...

The innovation-model in the free/open source software (FOSS) domain differs fundamentally from the innovation-model in the proprietary software domain. Many FOSS advocates claim that opportunities for software patenting, which have recently been expanded in some countries and are used primarily...

This paper describes the history and the commonly used software licensing terms of the free software and open source movements. It explains the GPL and discusses attempts to enforce the GPL. The GPL is a revolutionary copyright license that has allowed software developers to use existing law to...

This paper provides an explanation as to why software manufacturers from developed countries tolerate widespread copyright infringement in less developed countries and often even offer local versions of their products. In a simple two-period framework, I show that if network externalities are...

In this paper I study how innovation investment in a software duopoly is affected by the fact that one of the firms is, or might become Open Source. Firms can either be proprietary source (PS) or open source (OS) and have different initial technological levels. An OS firm is a for profit...

The first part of this article established and reviewed the policy basis for the radical departure from traditional intellectual property norms effected by the application of copyright law to the protection of technology in the form of computer programs. Computer programs are vulnerable to...

The Microsoft cases in the United States and in Europe have been influential in determining the contours of the substantive liability standards for dominant firms in US antitrust law and in EC Competition law. The competition law remedies that were adopted, following the finding of liability,...