Copyright is typically justified by the rationale that profits induce authors and other artists to invest resources in cultural production. This rationale is vulnerable to the objection that some artists have intrinsic incentives to invest in cultural production and do not require significant...

Private certification mechanisms are a key component of the regulatory infrastructure in the financial sector and other commercial settings. It is generally assumed that certification intermediaries have profit-based incentives to deliver accurate information to the certified market. But this...

Digital markets offer abundant free content but exhibit extreme concentration among content aggregation intermediaries. These characteristics are linked. In commoditized weak-IP markets, firms earn revenues by bundling free content for users with positively priced advertising services for firms....

Legal scholars have tended to approach the licensing of intellectual property rights with skepticism, calling for legal intervention to protect the public domain against purported encroachment by IP licensors. Recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court are consistent with this view. This...

Patent transactions are a key component of technology markets, enabling patent owners and other firms to efficiently commercialize new technologies on the costly and risky path from “lab” to “market.” Mandatory patent exhaustion without the possibility of contractual waiver or...

Intellectual property scholars and policymakers often assert that technology and creative markets suffer from “anti-commons” (“AC”) effects that restrain innovation within a web of conflicting intellectual property claims. A minority view asserts that market players have incentives and...

Scholarly and popular commentary often assert that markets characterized by intensive patent issuance and enforcement suffer from “patent thickets” that suppress innovation. This assertion is difficult to reconcile with continuous robust levels of R&D investment, coupled with declining...

Hollywood film studios, talent and other deal participants regularly commit to, and undertake production of, high-stakes film projects on the basis of unsigned “deal memos,” informal communications or draft agreements whose legal enforceability is uncertain. These “soft contracts”...