"Owning the Sun tells the story of one of the most contentious fights in human history: the legal right to control the production of lifesaving medicines. Medical science began as a discipline geared toward the betterment of all human life, but the merging of research with intellectual property...

One of the theoretical premises of the patent system is that it enhances the dissemination of valuable information by assuring creators of new inventions a limited monopoly for the exploitation of their inventions. As a tool of state policy, the patent system seeks to catalyze the...

The "tragedy of the commons" metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an "anticommons" in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can...