Intellectual Property

Market Power Screens Willingness-to-Pay

This paper proposes a new method for rewarding innovation by firms.

Patent Law’s Audience

The authors develop a basic matrix to analyze the problems inherent in patent law’s communication with its audience.

Functionality in Design Protection Systems

The authors analyze functionality doctrine in the design patent context and offer suggestions for improving it.

Patent Holdup, the ITC, and the Public Interest

The authors recount the impact of the ITC in providing an avenue around the eBay decision and propose possible remedies.

Reforming Software Patents

The author looks back to the agrarian and railroad patent crises to draw parallels to software patent reform efficacy.

Communities of Innovation

The author analyzes the Market Correction Hypothesis using an ethnographic study and finds reality differs from theory.

Partial Patents

The authors propose using partial patents to reform the patent system in a way that is both feasible and innovative.

Deal or No Deal? Licensing Negotiations by Standard Setting Organizations

This paper determines when negotiations between standard-setting firms and patent holders are economically desirable.

Google Book Search in the Gridlock Economy

Michael Heller’s book The Gridlock Economy argues that too many property rights can block economic growth. Such gridlock results when the property rights are intertwined, so that each right becomes valueless without permission to use the others.

Life After Bilski

In Bilski v. Kappos, the Supreme Court accepted that business methods could be patented. The opinion left courts struggling to decide when ideas are too abstract to be patented. The patentability of abstract ideas results in overbroad patents.