Commentators have poured forth a loud and sustained outcry over the past few years that sees property rule treatment of intellectual property (IP) as a cause of excessive transaction costs, thickets, anticommons, hold-ups, hold-outs, and trolls, which unduly tax and retard innovation,...

Debates about patent policy often focus on the potential for the threat of a court-imposed remedy for patent infringement to cause manufacturing entities and others to suffer patent holdup, especially when standardized industries are involved. This article uses lessons from the broader economics...

The debate over potential antitrust concerns for the use of protected intellectual property within standard setting often centers on the rules and regulations in place at Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs). While the typical focus is on whether or not particular rules should be mandated for...

Standard accounts of IP law describe systems of legal exclusion intended to prompt the production and distribution of intellectual resources, or information and knowledge, by making those things artificially scarce. The argument presented here frames IP law instead as one of several possible...

This chapter explores the related ideas of access to knowledge resources and shared governance of those resources, often known as commons. Knowledge resources consist of many types and forms. Some are tangible, and some are intangible. Some are singular; some are reproduced in copies. Some are...

Based on conflicting Federal Circuit case law, many academics have written, and many practitioners likely believe, that claim meanings or their applications may expand over time for purposes of literal infringement. But this common wisdom is wrong. Under existing Federal Circuit rules, the first...

The US case Akamai Technologies Inc v Limelight Networks Inc brought the patent world's attention to the issue of if and how a patentee may enforce a method claim against a party who performs some of the steps in a patented method but leaves other steps to be performed by a third party. The case...

A current refrain in patent policy discourse is that “overly-broad” patents of “dubious validity” retard innovation. We briefly review expressions of the thesis to show that they reduce to the allegation that disagreements over enforceable patent scope and/or validity harm innovation....

What types of intellectual property (IP) rights can be vested in the components of a scalable quantum computer? Are there sufficient market-set innovation incentives for the development and dissemination of quantum software and hardware structures? Or is there a need for open source ecosystems,...

Exporting values into society through technologyChina’s relentless advance in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and quantum computing has engendered a significant amount of anxiety about the future of America’s technological supremacy. The resulting debate centres around the impact of China’s...