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Of Mice And Men: Why An Anticommons Has Not Emerged In The Biotechnological Realm, Chester J. Shiu
Of Mice And Men: Why An Anticommons Has Not Emerged In The Biotechnological Realm, Chester J. Shiu
Chester J Shiu
In 1998 Michael Heller and Rebecca Eisenberg posited that excessive patenting of fundamental biomedical innovations might create a “tragedy of the anticommons.” A decade later, their dire predictions have not come to pass, an outcome which calls much of the legal scholarship on the topic into question. This Article proposes that legal commentators’ theoretical arguments have largely ignored two very important factors. First, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the single most important actor in the biomedical research industry—has played an active role in keeping the biomedical research domain open. In particular, regardless of what the current patent regime may theoretically …