This five-page essay responds to Henry Smith's article, quot;Intellectual Property as Property: Delineating Entitlements in Information.quot;A virtual cottage industry of intellectual property (IP) models has sprung up in recent years. To the mix, Professor Smith adds modularity, in which there...

Consumers’ right to repair their products is under attack. Manufacturers have decimated this long-held right by making parts unavailable, preventing products from working, and imposing software restrictions. Farmers can no longer repair tractors, medical professionals can’t fix ventilators,...

Is antitrust law up to the task of addressing the "New Economy"? That is the question many have asked in recent years. And that is one of the key questions addressed by the Antitrust Modernization Commission ("AMC"), a commission that Congress established in 2002 "to examine whether the need...

The issues presented by the intersection of the patent system and the antitrust laws have never been as pressing as they are today. The number of issued patents is skyrocketing. Companies are more frequently entering into arrangements with competitors not only to recover their investment from...

In my testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, I explained the benefits of legislation addressing anticompetitive conduct that brand-name drug companies have employed: sample denials, pay-for-delay settlements, citizen petitions, product hopping, and patent thickets. By increasing generic...

Standards, common platforms allowing products to work together, are ubiquitous in our economy. But imagine that a company:(1) has a patent needed to use a standard, (2) promises to license the patent on reasonable terms, and then (3) says it was just kidding as it seeks to block the product or...

Innovation is crucial to the U.S. economy. But many of our laws and policies are not promoting innovation. This Essay addresses this problem. The first set of proposals focuses on copyright law. The recommendations avoid vague copyright law and suggest the elimination of statutory damages and...

One of the areas of copyright law in most desperate need of reform is statutory damages. And while damages awards against direct infringers have received most of the attention, the effect on secondary infringers threatens to be far more detrimental for innovation. This submission to the...

Bert Foer is one of the most influential figures in the past quarter century of antitrust. His founding and development of the American Antitrust Institute (AAI) filled a significant hole in late 20th-century antitrust and served as a useful counterweight to the Chicago School. In addition to...

Standards, common platforms that allow products to work together, are essential to the modern economy. But standards often are based on patented technologies. And in what has been referred to as "patent holdup," the owners of patents incorporated into standards may exploit that power by refusing...