We study how trademarks affect reuse of creative works in the comics industry. As a creative industry, the comics industry systematically relies on copyrights. But trademark protection can also be exploited to generate income from the reuse of comic characters or to strategically exclude others...

Chung and Cox (1994) provided an intuitively appealing stochastic model which indicates that superstars may exist regardless of talent and which gives rise to the Yule distribution. We adopt a different empirical approach and test its goodness-of-fit using a parametric bootstrap and several...

Liability rules affect the incentives of intermediaries to disseminate and curate creative works, in particular when works build on the work of predecessors and they are potentially infringing copyright. In an application to the visual arts, we show that appropriation artists borrow images from...

It is contentious to what extent the existing copyright system contributes to the positive development of the regulated sectors of society. The present report shows that substantially more musical works and movies have been released in recent years than before the diffusion of digital copying...

Im Zusammenhang mit der Digitalisierung ist es seit Jahren strittig, inwieweit das bestehende Urheberrecht zu einer nachhaltig positiven Entwicklung der geregelten Gesellschaftsbereiche beiträgt. Dieser Bericht belegt, dass in den letzten Jahren deutlich mehr Musik und Filme veröffentlicht...

U.S. intellectual property law is firmly rooted in utilitarian principles. Copyright law is viewed as a means to give proper monetary incentives to authors for their creative effort. Many European copyright systems pursue additional goals: Authors have the right to be named as author, to control...

We explore the tail of patented invention value distributions by using value estimates obtained directly from patent holders. The paper focuses on those full-term German patents of the application year 1977 which were held by West German and U.S. residents. The most valuable patents in our data...

The U.S. has been under pressure to abandon the unique first-to-invent feature of its patent law for awarding patents. The opposition to reform however argues that switch to a first-to-file rule, the international norm, will undermine innovation. We evaluate this argument in a dynamic stochastic...

This paper analyses the nature of knowledge spillovers from research and development (R&D) in the field of liquid crystal display technology by estimating the impact of inventors' changing organizational and collaborative affiliations on the probability of citations in US patents filed between...

We examine the implications of pre-grant publication (PP) of patent applications in the context of a cumulative innovation model. We show that pre-grant publication of patents lead to fewer applications and fewer inventions, but it raises the probability that new technologies will reach the...