Proposed Uniform Commercial Code article 2B, which will govern transactions in information, will remake the law of intellectual property licensing in a radical way. But federal and state intellectual property policy impose significant limits on the ability of states to change these rules by...

Proposed Uniform Commercial Code article 2B, which will govern transactions in information, will remake the law of intellectual property licensing in a radical way. But federal and state intellectual property policies impose significant limits on the ability of states to change these rules by...

While the theory of the patent system is premised on the idea that patents will be used to exclude competitors, only a tiny fraction of patents are ever enforced. Legal and economic scholars have theorized as to how to identify valuable patents based on their individual characteristics. In this...

The confluence of two significant developments in modern patent practice leads me to write a paper with such a provocative title. The first development is the rise of hold-up as a primary component of patent litigation and patent licensing. The second development in the last three decades is the...

In this article, I introduce the interaction between intellectual property (IP) and antitrust law. I describe the ways in which these two important areas of government regulation are and are not in tension, and discuss the history of the relationship between these laws. I argue that IP and...

Trademarks have value because they reduce consumer search costs and thus promote overall efficiency in the economy. While the search costs theory provides a compelling argument for trademark rights, it also compels an equally important - but often overlooked - set of principles for defining and...

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is tasked with the job of reading patent applications and determining which ones qualify for patent protection. It is a Herculean task, and the Patent Office pursues it subject to enormous informational and budgetary constraints. Nonetheless, under...

We have conducted an empirical study of every reported doctrine of equivalents decision in both the Federal Circuit and the district courts during three periods - one before the Federal Circuit's 2000 Festo opinion, one after that opinion but before the Supreme Court's 2002 opinion, and a third...

Patent law gives patent owners not just the right to prevent others from copying their ideas, but the power to control the use of their idea even by those who independently develop a technology with no knowledge of the patent or the patentee. In an important paper, Samson Vermont challenges this...

We study several interconnected problems that arise under the current U.S. patent system when a patent covers one component or feature of a complex product, This situation is common in the information technology sector of the economy. First, we show using bargaining theory that the threat to...