This thesis aims to provide clues on how software developers could use and distribute proprietary software and open source software to run their business smoothly.Proprietary software is protected by copyright and/or patent that confers the rightholders exclusive rights for the use of their...

There is considerable debate regarding the use of intellectual property rights (IPR) to spur innovation in the software industry. In this paper we focus on the choice of intellectual property right regimes and industry growth. We begin by developing a growth optimal mixture of open source and...

Over the past several decades an expansion of coverage has evolved in individual intellectual property rights, especially copyright and patent. This expansion has caused overlap to occur between rights, thus allowing for an inefficient intellectual property regime that permits overreaching...

The economic analyses of software piracy typically rely on the simplifying assumption that the product is offered by a single producer. We argue that a realistic description of the software market and associated economic aspects of software piracy might be also captured by studying competition...