This article examines three critical, interrelated challenges for reforming legal protection for computer software: (1) analyzing the market failures that might justify government intervention to define (or alter) the legal entitlements granted for software innovations; (2) predicting the likely...

Promoting Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) is of particular importance to nations engaging in significant innovation. The existing literature relating to software piracy research is typified by the use qualitative methods to analyse the impact of IPRs on software piracy. Most concern...

In the wake of a series of court cases extending patents to software, open-source software proponents have proposed a number of arguments for limiting or even eliminating software patents. In particular, they claim that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has done a poor job of reviewing...

The economic characteristics of software and transaction costs explain, why closed source and open source software co-exist. It is about the efficient use of a non- and anti-scarce resource. But because of ex-post transaction costs that lead to information asymmetries, some property rights...

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...