Although much ink has been spilled over the decision of the Supreme Court in eBay v. Mercexchange to modify the test for equitable relief in patent cases and to nullify the long-standing presumption that victims of infringement are always entitled to permanent injunctions, an obvious point is...

Trademark dilution is a highly controversial cause of action that has been the subject of hundreds of law review articles, but no significant scientific work. We analyze 60 years of telephone white pages, corporate & LLC naming data, advertisements from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,...

This article provides an introduction to the study of brand-name sharing, and presents results from an empirical study of sharing rates among 131 famous brand names from 1940 through 2010, conducted through an examination of business names in the white pages telephone directories of Chicago,...

This article considers current proposals for patent law reform in light of a simple theory about intellectual property law: In a world without transaction costs, the assignment of property rights is not necessary to stimulate the optimal production of creative goods. Because potential users of...

Economists and policymakers have recently defended the extension of copyright protection to assure the efficient exploitation of existing works. They assert that works in the public domain may be under-exploited due to the lack of property rights or over-exploited due to congestion...

Contrary to popular belief, the twentieth century was a good one for commercial apple varietal diversity. As measured by availability in commercial nursery catalogs, significant gains were made in both absolute number of apple varieties and the available number of pre-1900 historic varieties. In...

The intellectual property system does not seem to drive the rate of innovation in the market for vegetable varieties. Drawing on a unique data set of all plant patents, plant variety protection certificates, and utility patents among 42 vegetable varieties, this short paper examines the...

According to the conventional wisdom, the twentieth century was a disaster of monumental proportions for vegetable crop diversity. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Our study of 2004 commercial seed catalogs shows twice as many 1903 crop varieties surviving as previously reported in the iconic...