U.S. intellectual property law is firmly rooted in utilitarian principles. Copyright law is viewed as a means to give proper monetary incentives to authors for their creative effort. Many European copyright systems pursue additional goals: Authors have the right to be named as author, to control...

Digital designs - that is, designs for display on electronic screens - have recently burst onto the intellectual property (IP) stage. While in the U.S. a smattering of legal studies have recently addressed the question of digital design as a copyright-, trademark- and patent-eligible subject...

De manière générale, les incitations à innover dépendent d'un certain nombre de caractéristiques : coût de la R&D, nature de l'innovation, financement de la R&D... Dans ce cadre d'analyse, on peut montrer qu'il n'existe pas une relation simple entre un type d'innovation et son...

A large literature asserts that standard essential patents (SEPs) allow their owners to “hold up” innovation by charging fees that exceed their incremental contribution to a final product. We evaluate two central, interrelated predictions of this SEP hold-up hypothesis: (1) SEP-reliant...

Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of authorship is typically not available to the public. Moreover at...

The paper deals with two aspects: the public ownership of intellectual property rights and the holding of the title (individuals vs institutions) for the public financed research. A key problem in the past and still now in Europe has been the low transfer of results coming from public research...

The term "intellectual property" is a relatively a modern term, first used in its current meaning when the UN established the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 1967. Beforehand laws around the world protected various aspects of informational goods - inventions and creations -...

The Italian and European regulatory framework for patents would benefit from further improvements in order to foster dynamic competition between Italian firms. At the national level the exclusive allocation of the right to patent inventions to universities, rather than to researchers, would...

What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: For example, does the existence of strong patent laws encourage...

We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the trade-offs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at the use of other means of formal...