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Full-Text Articles in Law
Digital Wars -- Legal Battles And Economic Bottlenecks In The Digital Information Industries, Curt A. Hessler
Digital Wars -- Legal Battles And Economic Bottlenecks In The Digital Information Industries, Curt A. Hessler
ExpressO
The Digital Age has spawned major legal battles over the fundamental principles of intellectual property law and antitrust law. These diverse struggles can best be analyzed using the basic norm of "value added" from neo-classical normative economics. This analysis suggests that current intellectual property doctirnes provide excessive protection and current antitrust doctrines remain awkward in dealing with the cross-market leveraging of monopoly power in the presence of "natural monopolies" created by network effects.
Digital Wars -- Legal Battles And Economic Bottlenecks In The Digital Information Industries, Curt A. Hessler
Digital Wars -- Legal Battles And Economic Bottlenecks In The Digital Information Industries, Curt A. Hessler
ExpressO
The Digital Revolution has created the apparent anomaly that information, though very cheap to create and near costless to share, is managed by industries that are increasingly concentrated and roiled by endless legal warfare. This paper surveys the major legal battles by subjecting all of them to the familiar norm of "maximizing economic value added", as defined by neo-classical "welfare economics". The various legal wars are traced to defects and confusions in current legal approaches to intellectual property (the "property wars") and to antitrust doctrines (the "monopoly wars").
Towards A Differentiated Products Theory Of Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo
Towards A Differentiated Products Theory Of Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The well-known “access-incentives” tradeoff that lies at the heart of the standard economic analysis of copyright follows largely from the assumption that copyright turns authors into monopolists. If one instead analyzes copyright through a framework that allows for product differentiation and entry, the access-incentives tradeoff becomes less significant. By increasing producer appropriability and profit, increased copyright protection can stimulate entry of competitors producing similar works, which in turn results in lower prices, increased product variety, and increased access. This approach would also broaden set of available policy instruments, although disentangling the effects of one from another can be quite complicated.