Restrictions aimed at limiting cross-border trade within the EU are prima facie unlawful, irrespective of their effects, under Articles 101 and 102 TFEU. The strict legal treatment of these practices is a function of the place and role of competition law in the Treaties. It is clear from the...

What is accepted as payment has changed over time, and so have the ways in which payments are made. Bitcoin, a cryptographic computer protocol, represents for some just another currency to release and receive payments. For others to speculate or to diversify into an alternative asset class. In...

Google distributes proprietary applications for its open-source Android mobile operating system (OS) free of charge. Some of those applications (apps) are offered together as a suite of apps known as Google Mobile Services (GMS). Manufacturers of mobile devices can agree, pursuant to Google's...

How does the development of formal standards for information and communication technologies shape the behavior of firms that may need the technologies to develop new products and services? We argue that standardization lowers the search costs of identifying important intellectual property rights...

Social media has become a dominant force in the landscape of modern communications. From political uprisings in the Middle East to labor disputes in Washington State, social media has fundamentally disrupted the way in which communications take place. As noted constitutional scholar Erwin...

Strategic patenting is widely believed to raise the costs of innovating, especially in industries characterised by cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on Ramp;D, patenting and market value in the computer software industry. We focus on two key aspects:...

This Chapter discusses the emergence of online word of mouth, the process by which consumers disseminate their views about marketplace goods and services. Due to online word of mouth, consumers have an unprecedented ability to influence the brand perceptions of other consumers. Unfortunately,...

The aim of this paper is to focus on the emerging situation in which open source software is nowadays produced not only by individual developers but in a growing proportion by firms that hire programmers for their own objectives of development in open source or for contributing to open source...

Under what conditions is government regulation better at protecting market participants than private, evolving, market-driven protections? An intriguing answer to that question emerges if we examine a relatively unregulated area of market participant protection: e-commerce privacy. In the United...

The international intellectual property regime has so far failed to deliver on the promise of technological advancement in Eastern Europe and other emerging markets with respect to the software industry. Local programmers have had little to gain from a stronger protection of copyright in their...