The protection of strong rights under patent law is intended to incentivize investment in innovation. Beyond this protection, should patent law also impose responsibilities upon patent holders? The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that the power patent law confers upon technology companies far...

Intellectual property rights are monopoly rights, which have undesirable welfare properties. Therefore, several studies suggest to use rewards as incentives for innovation instead. However, these studies have thus far had little effect on actual policy, possibly because such rewards may be...

The trade-off between the harms of copyright infringement and the harms to innovation from overzealous enforcement have been central to the copyright debate for decades. US courts have tried to fashion a body of law that strikes a balance between these dangers. Two related trends in copyright...

On May 5, 2021, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced that the U.S. would support a “waiver of IP protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help end the pandemic” currently being discussed at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The unprecedented U.S. support of the proposed WTO IP...

We study the production of knowledge when many researchers or inventors are involved, in a setting where tensions can arise between individual public and private contributions. We first show that without some kind of coordination, production of the public knowledge good (science or research...

Investigations and litigation involving standard-essential patents (SEPs) have been brought around the world. In the last several years, India has drawn attention to itself by raising several novel and controversial concerns regarding SEPs. For example, in 2013 and 2014, the Competition...

Profit on proprietary research tools is determined partly by the remedies for infringement, such as damages and injunctions. We investigate how damages under a liability rule and the opportunity for injunctions under a property rule can affect the incentives to develop research tools. We show...

Intellectual property is characterized as a set of intangible assets which is a product of human intellect and needs to be protected by having similar protective rights that apply to physical/tangible assets. Considering the utilitarian perspective upon this, it can be said that Jeremy Bentham...