Law Commons^™

Competition For Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Both antitrust and IP law are limited and imperfect instruments for regulating innovation. The problems include high information costs and lack of sufficient knowledge, special interest capture, and the jury trial system, to name a few. More fundamentally, antitrust law and intellectual property law have looked at markets in very different ways. Further, over the last three decades antitrust law has undergone a reformation process that has made it extremely self conscious about its goals. While the need for such reform is at least as apparent in patent and copyright law, very little true reform has actually occurred.

Antitrust has …

Competition Policy And The Scope Of Intellectual Property Protection, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This book of CASES AND MATERIALS ON INNOVATION AND COMPETITION POLICY is intended for educational use. The book is free for all to use subject to an open source license agreement. It differs from IP/antitrust casebooks in that it considers numerous sources of competition policy in addition to antitrust, including those that emanate from the intellectual property laws themselves, and also related issues such as the relationship between market structure and innovation, the competitive consequences of regulatory rules governing technology competition such as net neutrality and interconnection, misuse, the first sale doctrine, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Chapters …

Converting Intellectual Assets Into Property, Thomas G. Field Jr

Law Faculty Scholarship

The mouse and graphic interface were first commercialized on Macintosh computers. Yet, Steve Jobs is said to have derived both from the Alto computer developed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. While Jobs became a billionaire, "Xerox completely failed to get into the personal computer business, missing one of the biggest business opportunities in history."

Preferring to be more akin to Apple than to Xerox, firms are increasingly mindful that their most valuable assets are apt to be ideas and information instead of land, buildings and inventory. Not capable of being fenced in or locked up, intangible assets can be …

Copyrights And Beyond In The Digital Age, Thomas G. Field Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

At one time, only works visible to the naked eye were copyrightable, but that has long since changed. Now, works capable of perception only by use of VCRs or computers, for example, enjoy the same protection as books, paintings and sculpture. In 1994, William S. Strong reported that he had "heard Chicken Littles say that the sky is falling in on copyright owners" in the digital age and predicted to the contrary. He was right; publishers' problems may have changed in degree but not in kind. For important, if not critical, internet needs to be met, providers must recoup costs.