Do patents provide critical incentives to encourage investment in innovation? Or, instead, do patents impose legal risks and burdens on innovators that discourage innovation, as some critics now claim? This paper reviews empirical economic evidence on how well patents perform as a property system

Technological breakthroughs occasionally set off floods of inventions and associated patents. The decline of the business method exception to patentability is likely to increase the frequency of patent floods. Future technological breakthroughs might now cause two different patent floods: a...

This chapter reviews the law and economics literature on intellectual property law and price discrimination. We introduce legal scholars to the wide range of techniques used by intellectual property owners to practice price discrimination; in many cases the link between commercial practice and...

I show that copyright law is intimately connected to price discrimination. First, price discrimination is common in markets for copyrighted works. Second, many features of copyright law affect resale or personal arbitrage and so influence the profitability of price discrimination. For example,...

The growth of digital information transmission worries copyright holders who fear the new technology threatens their profits because of greater piracy and widespread sharing of digital works. They have responded with proposals for expanded protection of digital works. Specifically, they seek...

When innovation is cumulative, early patentees can hold up later innovators. Under complete information, licensing before R&D avoids holdup. But when development costs are private information, ex ante licensing may only occur in regimes with sub-optimal patent policy