Decided by the Supreme Court in 1948, Funk Brothers notably required that patent claims covering laws of nature apply those laws in novel or nonobvious ways in order to be eligible for patenting. More recently, the Supreme Court revived and expanded upon Funk Brothers' "inventive concept"...

In 2008, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law conducted the most comprehensive study to date on startup companies and the patent system. The study consisted of a survey, which led to primarily quantitative data, as well as more in-depth pre- and post-survey interviews...

In his article Exchanging Information Without Intellectual Property (91 Tex. L. Rev. 227 (2012)), Michael Burstein makes an important contribution to the literature by debunking a long-standing assumption underlying Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow’s famous disclosure paradox -- namely, that the...

In a widely reported article by Jeffrey Rosenfeld and Christopher Mason published in Genome Medicine, significant misstatements were made, because the authors did not sufficiently review the claims – which define the legal scope of a patent – in the patents they analyzed. Specifically, the...

About half, probably more, of all patented inventions in the United States are never commercially exploited. Even many of the most commercially significant inventions take decades to come to market. In this article, I contend that the patent system is substantially retarding the...

Recent studies estimate that the economic impact of U.S. patent litigation may be as large as $80 billion per year and that the overall rate of U.S. patent litigation has been growing rapidly over the past twenty years. And yet, the relationship of the macroeconomy to patent litigation rates has...

This paper develops a growth model aimed at understanding the potential effects of globalization of production on rate of innovation, distribution of skilled labor income between the North and South, and welfare of skilled workers in both regions. We adopt a dynamic general equilibrium...

We derive a simple equation to calculate the global welfare impact of the simultaneous reduction of trade costs between multiple country-pairs. Interestingly, we find that we obtain the same equation for a broad class of trade models. Moreover, balanced trade is mostly not required for the...

We construct a tractable general equilibrium model of cumulative innovation and growth, in which new ideas strictly improve upon frontier technologies, and productivity improvements are drawn in a stochastic manner. The presence of positive knowledge spillovers implies that the decentralized...

This paper develops a growth model aimed at understanding the effects of globalization of production on rate of innovation, distribution of labor income between the North and South and welfare of workers in both regions. We adopt a dynamic general equilibrium product cycle model, assuming that...