In many industries, the arc of our contemporary economy bends towards bigness. The now-ubiquitous digital platform companies such as Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix and (in China) Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba are the best-known examples. While some concerned onlookers propose structural remedies,...

Recent patent policy emphasizes the superiority of ex ante licensing over ex post patent assertion. Ex ante means before costs are sunk by a patent defendant, so licensing at this stage avoids the leveraging of a defendant’s investments in product design which is a presumptive aspect of...

Technical standards, such as interface protocols or file formats, are extremely important in the network industries that add so much value to the world economy today. Under some circumstances, the assertion of patent rights against established industry standards can seriously disrupt these...

In this paper, Professor Merges describes the emergence of patents for business "methods" or concepts, such as Internet airplane ticket pur-chase systems. Professor Merges is agnostic about whether these patents are worthwhile. Nevertheless, he argues that the increased volume of patent...