This paper reviews the literature on the economics of intellectual property rights (IPR), with a particular focus on the main industrial property rights of patents and trade marks. Intellectual property rights arise from the legal protection accorded to certain inventions or creations. We begin...

Rapid technological advances and commercialisation of the emerging field of nanotechnology will challenge traditional international and domestic regulatory regimes, including intellectual property rights. This article examines the role of the World Trade Organisation's Trade-Related Intellectual...

In an earlier study we analysed how the United States Patent and Trade Mark Office, the European Patent Office and the Japan Patent Office (jointly referred to as the 'Trilateral Offices' or TOs) assessed reach-through patent claims in biotechnology, under the requirements of 'utility', 'written...

Patent thickets exist and given the current developments, they continue to persist. Patent thickets enable blocking patent right holders to hold-up other firms, and thereby they could be anticompetitive. To address the issue of patent thickets, competition authorities would benefit from having a...

Patents lead to ex-post dead-weight losses arising from a non-competitive market structure for the invention. Many have argued that introducing independent invention as a defense (IID) to patent infringement can increase social welfare by decreasing such dead-weight losses at the price of a...

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...

Current international patent rules strike an uneasy balance between conflicting views about patents. The precarious nature of this balancing act is illustrated by the recent heated debate about the conditions under which compulsory licenses will be available for certain essential medicines under...

This paper investigates characteristics of patents involved in infringement lawsuits in weak intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes. Weak IPR regimes usually feature weak patent enforcement, such as relatively low level of compensation to infringement loss or damage awards being capped by an...

Patent-assertion entities, sometimes known as `patent trolls,' do not manufacture goods themselves but profit from licensing agreements that they often enforce via the threat of litigation. This paper explores empirically how litigation by a patent troll affected the sales of medical imaging...

In private enforcement systems such as the one for patents, remedies perform the “public” function of determining the optimal amount of protection and deterrence. If every patent were properly granted and had just the right scope to incentivize innovation, then strict enforcement and harsh...