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2011

Antitrust

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Removing Property From Intellectual Property And (Intended?) Pernicious Impacts On Innovation And Competition, F. Scott Kieff Jan 2011

Removing Property From Intellectual Property And (Intended?) Pernicious Impacts On Innovation And Competition, F. Scott Kieff

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

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, competition, and economic growth. The popular response has been to seek a legislative shift towards some limited use of weaker, liability rule treatment, usually portrayed as “just enough” to facilitate transactions in those special cases where the bargaining problems are at their worst and where escape hatches are most needed. This essay is designed to make two contributions. …


The Ftc, Ip, And Ssos: Government Hold-Up Replacing Private Coordination, F. Scott Kieff, Richard A. Epstein, Daniel F. Spulber Jan 2011

The Ftc, Ip, And Ssos: Government Hold-Up Replacing Private Coordination, F. Scott Kieff, Richard A. Epstein, Daniel F. Spulber

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In its recent report entitled “The Evolving IP Marketplace,” the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advances a far-reaching regulatory approach (Proposal) whose likely effect would be to distort the operation of the intellectual property (IP) marketplace in ways that will hamper the innovation and commercialization of new technologies. The gist of the FTC Proposal is to rely on highly non-standard and misguided definitions of economic terms of art such as “ex ante” and “hold-up,” while urging new inefficient rules for calculating damages for patent infringement. Stripped of the technicalities, the FTC Proposal would so reduce the costs of infringement by downstream …