This paper examines the duty of disclosure in patent law and discusses the potential insufficiency of disclosing a computer program’s functionality in patent applications for certain categories of software – applications working on closed platforms. In Canada, software patents are generally...

Using a unique conjoint data set drawn from 281 college students in Hong Kong. I estimate a random-coefficient discrete choice demand system for Microsoft Office from legal and various illegal sources. Counterfactual results show two things. First, most students would switch to Internet piracy...

The paper entertains the growing IP debate on the patentability of the software patents. In due analysis, the paper has corroborated the analytical emphasis on what the law is and what the law ought to be

This article seeks to explain the similarities between how software patents are treated under U.S. law and under European law. Finding that the similarities between the two systems far outweigh the differences, the article goes on to hypothesize that both systems, in an effort to compete for...

Piracy is commonly considered to be detrimental to the software industry. The industry has taken aggressive steps to curb piracy worldwide. This study questions the wisdom of such aggressive anti-piracy effort in a competitive environment. We show that piracy attracts the most price sensitive...

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...