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Series

2003

Patents

Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Law

Misreading A Canonical Work: An Analysis Of Mansfield's 1994 Study, Paul J. Heald Apr 2003

Misreading A Canonical Work: An Analysis Of Mansfield's 1994 Study, Paul J. Heald

Scholarly Works

It would be hard to overestimate the influence of Edwin Mansfield's 1994 empirical study for the International Finance Corporation (an arm of the World Bank) of American business executives' attitudes toward low levels of intellectual property protection in developing nations. His paper is ubiquitously cited for the proposition that if developing countries raise their level of intellectual property protection (especially patents), they will attract foreign investment and technology transfer. In the spirit of the honoree of this symposium, I take a skeptical new look at a canonical work and conclude that the developing world should be very suspicious of the …

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Legal Movements In Intellectual Property: Trips, Unilateral Action, Bilateral Agreements, And Hiv/Aids, Margo A. Bagley Jan 2003

Legal Movements In Intellectual Property: Trips, Unilateral Action, Bilateral Agreements, And Hiv/Aids, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

This Article begins with an overview of the relationship between the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the "TRIPS Agreement") and the HIV/AIDS pandemic which created the need for the Doha Declaration. It then discusses two trade-related movements, unilateral action and TRIPS-plus bilateral agreements, that call into question the long-term effectiveness of the TRIPS Agreement process, generally, and the benefits of the Doha Declaration, in particular, in addressing multiple facets of the access to essential medicines problem. This Article concludes that a consideration of these issues should be included in the development of any further TRIPS-related solutions to …

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Ideas, Artifacts, And Facilities: Information As A Common-Pool Resource, Charlotte Hess, Elinor Ostrom Jan 2003

Ideas, Artifacts, And Facilities: Information As A Common-Pool Resource, Charlotte Hess, Elinor Ostrom

Libraries' and Librarians' Publications

"The goal of this paper is to summarize the lessons learned from a large body of international, interdisciplinary research on common-pool resources (CPRs) in the past 25 years and consider its usefulness in the analysis of scholarly information as a resource. We will suggest ways in which the study of the governance and management of common-pool resources can be applied to the analysis of information and 'the intellectual public domain.' The complexity of the issues is enormous for many reasons: the vast number of players, multiple conflicting interests, rapid changes of technology, the general lack of understanding of digital technologies, …

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Cheap Drugs At What Price To Innovation: Does The Compulsory Licensing Of Pharmaceuticals Hurt Innovaton?, Colleen V. Chien Jan 2003

Cheap Drugs At What Price To Innovation: Does The Compulsory Licensing Of Pharmaceuticals Hurt Innovaton?, Colleen V. Chien

Faculty Publications

The patent system is built on the premise that patents provide an incentive for innovation by offering a limited monopoly to patentees. The inverse assumption that removing patent protection will hurt innovation has largely prevented the widespread use of compulsory licensing-the practice of allowing third parties to use patented inventions without patentee permission. In this Article, I empirically test this assumption. I compare rates of patenting and other measures of inventive activity before and after six compulsory licenses over drug patents issued in the 1980s and 1990s. As reported below, observe no uniform decline in innovation by companies affected by …

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Brief Of Law Professors As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Thomas G. Field Jr, William O. Hennessey, Craig S. Jepson, Karl F. Jorda Jan 2003

Brief Of Law Professors As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Thomas G. Field Jr, William O. Hennessey, Craig S. Jepson, Karl F. Jorda

Law Faculty Scholarship

Inventors lacking assurance of a market, or even the right to practice patented inventions, face considerable risk. Those who qualify for patents, in return for disclosure, receive only the assistance of the courts in excluding others from economic exploitation of their inventions. Already subject to many legislative and judicial limitations, patents should not be further subject to the functional equivalent of private inverse condemnation without congressional action.

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Rethinking Reexamination Reform: Is It Time For Corrective Surgery, Or Is It Time To Amputate?, Kristen Jakobsen Osenga Jan 2003

Rethinking Reexamination Reform: Is It Time For Corrective Surgery, Or Is It Time To Amputate?, Kristen Jakobsen Osenga

Law Faculty Publications

Reexamination was introduced as a mechanism for curing potentially invalid patents, as an antidote to the public's and the judiciary's lack of confidence in the PTO and the patent system in general. Instead of a curative fix, however, the reexamination provisions are more akin to a diseased or lame leg on the body of U.S. patent law. Reexamination fails to support the burden of public confidence it was intended to carry. It does not act in harmony with other limbs on the body of patent law or with other bodies of U.S. or foreign law. Over the years, Congress has …

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The Value Of Giving Away Secrets, Oren Bar-Gill, Gideon Parchomovsky Jan 2003

The Value Of Giving Away Secrets, Oren Bar-Gill, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay demonstrates the strategic advantage of narrow patents and unprotected publication of R&D output. Broad patents might stifle follow-on improvements by deterring potential cumulative innovators, who fear being held up by the initial inventor at the ex post licensing stage. By opting for a narrower patent and unprotected publication, the initial patent holder commits not to hold up follow-on inventors, thus promoting sequential innovation and generating lucrative licensing fees. Counterintuitively, in cumulative innovation settings, less protection benefits the patentee. This finding may serve as a counter-force to the much-lamented "anti-commons" problem. More generally, our theory demonstrates that the divergence …

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Patent Thickets: Strategic Patenting Of Complex Technologies, James Bessen Jan 2003

Patent Thickets: Strategic Patenting Of Complex Technologies, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Patent race models assume that an innovator wins the only patent covering a product. But when technologies are complex, this property right is defective: ownership of a product's technology is shared, not exclusive. In that case I show that if patent standards are low, firms build "thickets" of patents, especially incumbent firms in mature industries. When they assert these patents, innovators are forced to share rents under cross-licenses, making R&D incentives sub-optimal. On the other hand, when lead time advantages are significant and patent standards are high, firms pursue strategies of "mutual non-aggression." Then R&D incentives are stronger, even optimal.

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Information Wants To Be Free: Intellectual Property And The Mythologies Of Control, R. Polk Wagner Jan 2003

Information Wants To Be Free: Intellectual Property And The Mythologies Of Control, R. Polk Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

This article challenges a central tenet of the recent criticism of intellectual property rights: the suggestion that the control conferred by such rights is detrimental to the continued flourishing of a public domain of ideas and information. I argue that such theories understate the significance of the intangible nature of information, and thus overlook the contribution that even perfectly controlled intellectual creations make to the public domain. In addition, I show that perfect control of propertized information - an animating assumption in much of the contemporary criticism - is both counterfactual and likely to remain so. These findings suggest that …

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