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...

After a decade of bruising legal battles, the courts and software industry norms largely resolved the costly war over the scope of copyright protection for computer software. By the mid 1990s, freedom to develop interoperable devices, systems, and software triumphed over broad copyright...

We study an endogenous growth model where a profit-motivated R and D sector coexists with the introduction of free blueprints invented by philanthropists. These goods are priced at marginal cost, contrary to proprietary ones which are produced by a monopoly owned by the inventor. We show that...

This article investigates the relation between the level of publicness of digital goods - i.e. their degree of non-excludability and non-rivalness - and the pirating behaviour of the consumers. The main focus is put on the difference between the ex-ante level of publicness - determined by the...

We analyze the characteristics of new businesses in the German ICT industry, distinguishing them based on their choice between two IPR regimes: open source software (OSS) or closed source software (CSS). The share of new firms with an OSS-based business model has increased considerably over the...

This study examines the effect of network's structural holes, i.e., the absence of a link between two contacts who are both linked to an actor, on product development and profit growth of software ventures in two different institutional contexts of China and Russia. Using interview data of 159...

Spanish Abstract: Uno de los paradigmas es seguir considerando al capital y trabajo como los factores productivos más significativos para que las empresas puedan ser más competitivas. En la actualidad las empresas en cualquier actividad que se desenvuelvan requieren de tecnología,...

This paper reports the results of an original empirical study of the relationship between intellectual property and the financial performance of technology firms in the bioscience-technology industries. The study found a statistically significant positive relationship between the firms'...

Defensive Publishing denotes publication of an invention with the purpose of creating prior art, and thus preventing patents being granted on this invention. Although widely employed, it has hardly been investigated empirically. Our study is based on 56 in-depth interviews, among others with...