For a quarter century following the landmark 1980 decision of the Supreme Court in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, inventions and discoveries in biotechnology research appeared to be eligible for patent protection, assuming they meet the statutory standards for patent protection. The Supreme Court...

Innovation policy often focuses on the incentives of firms that sell new products. But optimal use of healthcare products also requires good information about the likely effects of products in different patients, and it is hard to provide the right incentives for producers to develop and...

Richard Nelsonamp;apos's The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research (1959) and Kenneth Arrowamp;apos's Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention (1962) presented the basic analytical tools still used to understand the patent system. Two subsequent changes-one...

The "tragedy of the commons" metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an "anticommons" in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can...

Patents are often portrayed as the necessary reward to compensate pharmaceutical firms for the huge costs and risks associated with Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-mandated clinical trials of new drugs. But the relationship between the patent system and other regulation of drugs is more...

In recent years data-sharing has been a recurring focus of struggle within the scientific research community as improvements in information technology and digital networks have expanded the ways that data can be produced, disseminated, and used. Information technology makes it easier to share...