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...

This paper examines fair-dealing and fair-use copyright exceptions in terms of their economic properties. A particular question in the United Kingdom is whether there would be economic advantages, in terms of promoting economic growth through the encouragement of innovative creative work, from...

As an economist, I find the current state of the law regarding damages for patent infringement – most particularly that relating to apportionment – frustrating at best and woefully incomplete at worst. Namely, damages case law for utility patent infringement provides two very different, but...

The United States has long been a country of prohibitions, with the most memorable prohibition in American history being the ban on alcohol sales in 1920, which lasted until the ratification of the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. While the federal ban on alcohol has long since been...

The US Congress has enacted expansions of copyright which arguably impose high social costs and generate little incentives for authorial creativity. When the two most expansive statutes were challenged as unconstitutional, the US Supreme Court rebuffed the challenges, partly on the supposed...

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) receives more prior art submissions by patent applicants than its patent examiners have the capacity to process. Although applicant prior art submissions are highly likely to contain references material to prosecution, evidence suggests that...

The last several years have witnessed a flurry of transformative patent reform activity. The Supreme Court has issued key rulings affecting the availability of injunctive and declaratory relief, revised the law of obviousness, and limited the extraterritorial reach of the patent act. Now...

As a result of the March 4, 2004 Supreme Court of Canada decision in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada for the first time in Canadian copyright history, the court determined that Canadian law must recognize a user right to carry on exceptions generally and fair dealing in...

The prevailing historical accounts of the formation of the US aircraft “patent pool” in 1917 assume the US government necessarily intervened to alleviate a patent hold-up among private aircraft manufacturers. We show these accounts to be inconsistent with the historical facts. We show that...

Since the mapping of the human genome and the technical innovations in the field of biotechnology, patent law has gone through great controversies. Protection is required for an investor to make an investment but how broad should the given protection be? Whether the invention is a micro-organism...