Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Antitrust And Platform Monopoly, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Are large digital platforms that deal directly with consumers “winner take all,” or natural monopoly, firms? That question is surprisingly complex and does not produce the same answer for every platform. The closer one looks at digital platforms the less they seem to be winner-take-all. As a result, competition can be made to work in most of them. Further, antitrust enforcement, with its accommodation of firm variety, is generally superior to any form of statutory regulation that generalizes over large numbers.

Assuming that an antitrust violation is found, what should be the remedy? Breaking up large firms subject to extensive …

Patent Value And Citations: Creative Destruction Or Strategic Disruption?, David S. Abrams, Ufuk Akcigit, Jillian Popadak

All Faculty Scholarship

Prior work suggests that more valuable patents are cited more and this view has become standard in the empirical innovation literature. Using an NPE-derived dataset with patent-specific revenues we find that the relationship of citations to value in fact forms an inverted-U, with fewer citations at the high end of value than in the middle. Since the value of patents is concentrated in those at the high end, this is a challenge to both the empirical literature and the intuition behind it. We attempt to explain this relationship with a simple model of innovation, allowing for both productive and strategic …

Poisoning The Next Apple? The America Invents Act And Individual Inventors, David S. Abrams, R. Polk Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the most significant patent law reform effort in two generations, has a dark side: It seems likely to decrease the patenting behavior of small inventors, a category which occupies special significance in American innovation history. In this paper we empirically predict the effects of the major change in the law: a shift in the patent priority rules from the United States’ traditional “first-to-invent” system to the predominant “first-to-file” system. While there has been some theoretical work on this topic, we use the Canadian experience with a similar change as a natural experiment to shed …

The Uncertain Future Of "Hot News" Misappropriation After Barclays Capital V. Theflyonthewall.Com, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

This is a follow-up piece to Professor Balganesh's 'Hot News': The Enduring Myth of Property in News, 111 COLUM. L. REV. 419 (2011), based on the Second Circuit's decision in Barclays Capital Inc. v. Theflyonthewall.com, 650 F.3d 876 (2d Cir. 2011).

Did Trips Spur Innovation? An Empirical Analysis Of Patent Duration And Incentives To Innovate, David S. Abrams

All Faculty Scholarship

How to structure IP laws in order to maximize social welfare by striking the right balance between incentives to innovate and access to innovation is an empirical question. It is a challenging one to answer, both because innovation is difficult to value and changes in IP protection are rare. The 1995 TRIPS agreement provides a unique opportunity to learn about this question for two reasons. First, the adoption of the agreement was uncertain until shortly before adoption, making it a plausibly exogenous change to patent duration. Second, the nature of the law change meant that the patent duration change was …