This Note applies the concept of "paradigm shifts" from the history and philosophy of science to describe how patents on biomedical research tools - inputs to basic research - can create conditions conducive to fundamental advances in scientific theory. Patents on research tools can prevent...

In 1938, Harold Hotelling argued that the optimum of the general welfare corresponds to the sale of everything at marginal cost and that therefore government revenues should be used to subsidize all industries having large fixed costs. Ronald Coase's 1946 article The Marginal Cost Controversy...

This Article challenges a standard proposition in intellectual property theory: creators are risk averse and, by extension, IP risk is undesirable. The interdisciplinary field of creativity research suggests that this proposition is wrong. A willingness to take risks appears to be an essential...

Vaccines play a crucial role in improving global public health, with the ability to stem the spread of infectious diseases and the potential to eradicate them completely. Compared with pharmaceuticals that treat disease, however, preventative vaccines for infectious diseases have received far...

The challenge of achieving socially optimal incentives for innovation in public goods faces twin market failures: a market failure to adequately promote public goods invention and a market failure to implement innovative public goods once developed. Though innovation in private goods sometimes...

Intellectual property scholars have vigorously debated the merits of patents versus prizes for encouraging innovation, with occasional consideration of government grants. But these are not the only options. Perhaps most significantly, the patents-versus-prizes (or...

The conventional economic justification for global IP treaties begins from the premise that nation-states, if left to their own devices, will rationally underinvest in innovation incentives such as IP laws, grants, tax credits, and prizes (the “underinvestment hypothesis”). Under this...

Professor Sichelman’s article on “Purging Patent Law of Private Law Remedies” offers a welcome and useful perspective on the reform of patent remedies. In this comment I critique some of his assumptions regarding the “private” nature of patent and other remedies, then turn to...

The Bayh-Dole Act, which encourages patents on federally funded inventions, has been criticized for forcing consumers to "pay twice" for patented products – first through the tax system and again when the patentee charges a supracompetitive price. Supporters counter that patents promote...

Innovation is a primary source of economic growth, and is accordingly the target of substantial academic and government attention. Grants are a key tool in the government’s arsenal of tools to promote innovation, but legal academic studies of that arsenal have given them short shrift. While...