At the start of the Industrial Revolution, patentees created many novel and complex transactions to commercialize their property: they maximized their profits through sophisticated agreements that imposed restrictions on manufacturing, sales, and other uses of their inventions. When these...

We present a selective survey of the economic theory of intellectual property rights. After a brief description of the institutional framework, we discuss policy objectives and some basic welfare tradeoffs in intellectual property design. We consider the extent to which social objectives can be...

We investigate whether patents that are jointly held by legally independent companies help sustain product-market collusion. We use a simple model of repeated interactions to show that joint patents can serve collusive purposes. Our model generates two testable predictions: when joint patents...

What is the optimal allocation of prizes in an innovation race? Should the winner take all, or is it preferable that the original inventor shares the market with subsequent independent duplicators? Some recent papers in law and economics have argued that the latter, more permissive solution is...

One of the underlying justifications of the patent system is to encourage dissemination of scientific knowledge and promote innovation. Yet, the patent system is not a green card to innovation. Indeed, given our progress in science and the increasing rate of technological developments it is...

Section 292 of the Patent Act forbids the false marking of unpatented or infringing articles with the type of marks usually used by patentees to provide public notice of their patented inventions. Prior to the recent enactment of patent reform, the statute provided a rare qui tam enforcement...

Switzerland is about to implement a completely new patent litigation system, following the establishment of a new specialized federal patent trial court and the replacement of twenty-six cantonal codes of civil procedure with a single uniform federal code of civil procedure. This article...

Patent protection for genetic enhancements would tend to spur genetic innovation, but would tend to limit access to those genetic enhancements through discriminatory mechanisms such as price and favoritism. The patent system would likely ensure high rates of genetic enhancement innovation,...

The Federal Circuit is the most visible point of the intersection between competition and patent law. When a single case contains both competition and patent issues, precedents of that court, including those pertaining to governing legal burdens or presumptions, will be critical. It is worth...

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, all countries having patent systems required patentable inventions to be both new and useful. Now those two fundamental requirements have been joined by a third: Patentable inventions must also be nonobvious. The nonobviousness requirement is...