In their recent book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David Levine conclude that patents and copyrights are not necessary to provide protection for either innovation or creative expression and should be eliminated. The authors note the many flaws of the U.S. system of...

Hundreds of patents cover products in many high technology fields such as semiconductors, information technology, and biotechnology. Firms that make, sell, or use products in these fields often have to negotiate patent rights with many intellectual property owners. The time and effort required...

JEL Classifications: L41, K21 Abstract: When infringement of a patent dissipates profit relative to the licensing agreement that would otherwise occur, damages under the lost-profit rule deter infringement, and otherwise not. We develop this point in a general model and give two examples....

We investigate how liability rules and property rules affect the incentives to invest in research tools. We argue that it is hard to deter infringement under any of the enforcement regimes available. However, counterintuitively, a credible threat of infringement can actually be beneficial to the...

Intellectual property treaties have two main types of provisions: national treatment of foreign inventors, and harmonization of protections. I characterize the circumstances in which countries would want to treat foreign inventors the same as national inventors. I then argue that national...

Antitrust policy for the pooling of patents and other intellectual property rights has undergone a dramatic transformation since the first cases were decided at the beginning of the twentieth century. This transformation generally reflects developments in economics that provide a better...

This chapter reviews the history of antitrust enforcement for intellectual property and identifies reasons why appropriate antitrust enforcement for intellectual property may differ from antitrust enforcement for ordinary property. The complex interplay between the scope of patent protection and...

The trickle of business method patents issued by the United States Patent Office became a flood after the State Street Bank decision in 1998. Many scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decision itself. This paper discusses the likely impact...