The United States economy is struggling to recover from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. After several huge doses of conventional macroeconomic stimulus - deficit-spending and monetary stimulus - policymakers are understandably eager to find innovative no-cost ways of...

More than 2.5 million United States patents have been issued in the last twenty years. While these patents are spread across all industries, a large percentage are concentrated in the information technology (IT) industries, and others in biotechnology. The prevalence of patents in these...

Proposed Uniform Commercial Code article 2B, which will govern transactions in information, will remake the law of intellectual property licensing in a radical way. But federal and state intellectual property policy impose significant limits on the ability of states to change these rules by...

Proposed Uniform Commercial Code article 2B, which will govern transactions in information, will remake the law of intellectual property licensing in a radical way. But federal and state intellectual property policies impose significant limits on the ability of states to change these rules by...

Trademarks have value because they reduce consumer search costs and thus promote overall efficiency in the economy. While the search costs theory provides a compelling argument for trademark rights, it also compels an equally important - but often overlooked - set of principles for defining and...

Patent law gives patent owners not just the right to prevent others from copying their ideas, but the power to control the use of their idea even by those who independently develop a technology with no knowledge of the patent or the patentee. In an important paper, Samson Vermont challenges this...

We argued in our paper, "Patent Hold-Up and Royalty Stacking," that the threat to obtain a permanent injunction greatly enhances the patent holder's negotiating power, leading to royalty rates that exceed a benchmark level based on the value of the patented technology and the strength of the...

Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) typically require their members to license any standard-essential patent on Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Unfortunately, numerous high-stakes disputes have recently broken out over just what these “FRAND commitments” mean and...

We conduct a comprehensive study of all patent trials over the past eleven years. We find that juries are more favorable to patentees than judges, that (to our surprise) the length of a trial has no effect on its outcome, and that there are surprisingly modest differences between patentee win...