We formulate a simple model of optimal defensive disclosure by a monopolist facinguncertain antitrust enforcement and test its implications using unique data on defensivedisclosures and patents by IBM during 1955-1989. Our results indicate that strongerantitrust enforcement leads to more...

Intellectual property rights and competition policy are intimately related. In this paper I survey the economic literature analyzing the interaction between intellectual property law and competition law and how the boundary between these two policies is drawn in practice. Recognizing that...

Innovations typically rely on multiple inventions which, in turn, frequently are subject to multiple patents or patent applications. In such cases, fragmentation of patent ownership introduces obstacles that may significantly hinder innovation. Patent pools constitute one potential mechanism to...

One of the most difficult legal issues today involves settlements by which brand-name drug companies pay generic firms to delay entering the market. Such conduct requires courts to consider not only patent and antitrust law, but also the Hatch-Waxman Act, the complex regime governing behavior in...

The essay develops a new approach for antitrust analysis of pay-for-delay settlements in pharmaceutical patent infringement cases, an approach that shows them to be presumptively prohibited agreements in restraint of competition. The issue is timely in light of the Watson v FTC case now pending...

The conventional legal analysis of technical standard setting derives primarily from antitrust law. But antitrust remedies, taken alone, may not be broad enough to address recent abuses of the standardization process. The principal example of this shortcoming is the well-known case of Rambus,...

In the past couple of decades, many scholars have debated the worthiness of the limited monopoly that patent law provides. The widespread attitude has always been, since the progress of the technological era, that in order to stimulate inventors and possessors of knowledge to embody their...

Licensing technology essential to a standard can present a hold-up problem. After designing new products incorporating a standard, a manufacturer could be confronted by an innovator asserting patent rights to essential technology. A damages remedy provided by antitrust or some other body of law...

In June 2009, the OECD Competition Committee continued a discussion on innovation that began in 2006. This roundtable revisited the ways in which competition and patents can influence innovative activity. It also explored the uncertainty created by pending patents and how that uncertainty can be...