We address an important issue the Supreme Court left unaddressed this spring in its blockbuster Google v. Oracle decision: are computer interfaces copyrightable at all? We argue that they aren’t, and that the Federal Circuit's decision to the contrary is an aberration that should not undermine...

Economists and legal scholars have debated the reasons people adopt open source software, and accordingly whether and to what extent the open source model can scale, replacing proprietary rights as a primary means of production. In this study, we use the release by a biotechnology company of...

Traditional justifications for patents are all based on direct or indirect contribution to the creation of new products. Patents serve the social interest if they provide not just invention, but innovation the world would not otherwise have. Non-practicing entities (NPEs) as well as...

Intellectual property (IP) is a form of regulation. Once we understand IP laws as government social policies that seek to alter market outcomes, we can start to think of those laws as part of a broader tapestry of government rules that affect innovation in a complex variety of ways. Sometimes...

This amicus brief supports the FTC's position in the 2d Circuit appeal of 1-800 Contacts v. FTC. The brief was joined by 29 intellectual property, Internet law, and antitrust professors.The case involves 1-800 Contacts' settlement agreements with its online competitors in which they agreed not...

New technologies continue to democratize, decentralize, and disrupt production, offering the possibility that scarcity will be a thing of the past for many industries. We call these technologies of abundance. But our economy and our legal institutions are based on scarcity. Abundance lowers...

Repeat patent plaintiffs - those who sue eight or more times on the same patents - have a disproportionate effect on the patent system. They are responsible for a sizeable fraction of all patent lawsuits. Their patents should be among the strongest, according to all economic measures of patent...