Law Commons^™

Smes, Open Innovation And Ip Management: Advancing Global Development, Stanley P. Kowalski

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] Micro-Small-Medium Enterprises (abbreviated herein henceforth as “SMEs”) are global drivers of technological innovation and economic development. Perhaps their importance has been somewhat eclipsed by the mega-multinational corporate entities. However, whereas the corporations might be conceptualized as towering sequoia trees, SMEs represent the deep, broad, fertile forest floor that nourishes, sustains and regenerates the global economic ecosystem.

[. . .]

Broadly recognized as engines of economic and global development, SMEs account for a substantial proportion of entrepreneurial activity in both industrialized and developing countries. Indeed, their role as dynamos for technological and economic progress in developing countries is critical and …

Agenda: Best Practices For Community And Environmental Protection, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center. Intermountain Oil And Gas Bmp Project, Colorado. Oil And Gas Conservation Commission

Best Practices for Community and Environmental Protection (October 14)

The first Intermountain BMP Project workshop, sponsored by the Natural Resources Law Center and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, was held in Rifle, Colorado on October 14, 2009 at the Garfield County Fairground for over 170 participants.

Speakers from Federal, state and local governments, the community, industry and environmental consultants, and conservation groups focused presentations and discussion on a greater understanding of what Best Management Practices (BMPs) are appropriate to the western slope of Colorado and how they are integrated into developments.

Slides: Innovative Best Practices For The Western Slope: Stormwater Management Solutions And Philosophy For The Oil And Gas Industry, Kyle N. Schildt

Best Practices for Community and Environmental Protection (October 14)

Presenter: Kyle N. Schildt, P.E., LT Environmental, Inc.

12 slides

Slides: Bmp Project, Kent Kuster

Best Practices for Community and Environmental Protection (October 14)

Presenter: Kent Kuster, Consultation Coordinator, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE)

17 slides

An Environmental Competition Statute, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This chapter from a forthcoming Cambridge Press book, Beyond Environmental Law, proposes emulating free market dynamics with a new regulatory instrument, the Environmental Competition Statute. This statute would authorize any polluter making a pollution reduction to require a dirtier competitor to reimburse it for the full cost of making this improvement along with a preset profit margin. This creates an economic dynamic similar to that prevailing in very competitive markets. In such markets, those who innovate in effect take money from those who do not, by taking over a portion of their market share. This statute similarly allows environmental innovators …

Using Ip To Suppress Innovation (On Purpose), James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

In this “IP Viewpoints” post, I hope to combine two Uncontroversial Premises to reach a Counterintuitive Conclusion about the role that intellectual property can play in the regulation of innovation.

First Uncontroversial Premise: IP is a useful tool for creating incentives to innovate, but too much IP protection is counterproductive.

Giving innovators exclusive control over certain uses of their innovations allows them to commercialize their inventiveness and creativity, and thus helps ensure a return of the resources they invest in their craft. But IP protection also brings with it certain costs – and when IP rights reach a certain level …

Innovation After The Revolution: Foreign Sovereign Bond Contracts Since 2003, Anna Gelpern, G. Mitu Gulati

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

For over a decade, contracts literature has focused on standardization. Scholars asked how terms become standard, and why they change so rarely. This line of inquiry painted a world where a standard term persists until it is dislodged by another standard term, perhaps after a brief window of ferment before the second term takes hold. It also overshadowed the early insights of boilerplate theories, which described contracts as a mix of standard and customized terms, and asked why the mix might be suboptimal. This article brings the focus back to the mix. It examines the development of selected provisions in …

Should The Government Prosecute Monopolies?, Maurice Stucke

Scholarly Works

In the past few years, courts and the Department of Justice have cited approvingly the Court's dicta in Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP. This article analyzes why the economic thinking in Trinko is wrong, and how the Court ignores its precedent involving the Sherman Act's concerns of monopolies' political, social and ethical implications. It responds to the Court's claim that cartel behavior is easier to identify and remedy than monopolistic behavior and proposes an improvement to the Court's current rule of reason standard to reduce the risk of false positives, while enabling the antitrust …

Death From The Public Domain?, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

In his recent article in the Texas Law Review, Ben Roin advances the claim that pharmaceutical innovation and the public’s health are harmed by the doctrines of non-obviousness and novelty. He does not mince words, labeling the nonobvious requirement as “perversity” with a “pernicious” effect on drug development. In his view, these standards pose an insurmountable barrier for drug companies seeking to commercialize inventions already in the public domain. He claims that valuable, life-saving drug ideas languish in the public domain because the companies face high barriers to entry from the FDA, but potential free riders are encouraged through the …

To (C) Or Not To (C)? Copyright And Innovation In The Digital Typeface Industry, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Intellectual property rights are often justified by utilitarian theory. However, recent scholarship suggests that creativity thrives in some industries in the absence of intellectual property protection. These industries might be called IP's negative spaces. One such industry that has received little scholarly attention is the typeface industry. This industry has recently digitized. Its adoption of digital processes has altered its market structure in ways that necessitate reconsideration of its IP negative status, with particular emphasis on copyright. This article considers the historical denial of copyright protection for typefaces in the United States, and examines arguments both for and against extending …

How Not To Invent A Patent Crisis, F. Scott Kieff, Henry E. Smith

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This short essay written for a broad audience addresses the problems that are at the center of current debates in academic and policy circles about the patent system. Most current patent reform proposals are designed to give officials and courts more power to weaken or eliminate ‘‘unworthy’’ patents and take primary aim at so-called patent trolls. This essay argues that in light of the rapid, and excessive, changes that have already occurred in the courts, what patent law needs is a tweaking of existing safety valves and processes - not opening the floodgates to more discretion and uncertainty.

Contracting For Innovation: Vertical Disintegration And Interfirm Collaboration, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles F. Sabel, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Rapidly innovating industries are not behaving the way theory expects. Conventional industrial organization theory predicts that, when parties in a supply chain have to make transaction-specific investments, the risk of opportunism will drive them away from contracts and toward vertical integration. Despite the conventional theory, however, contemporary practice is moving in the other direction. Instead of vertical integration, we observe vertical disintegration in a significant number of industries, as producers recognize that they cannot themselves maintain cutting-edge technology in every field required for the success of their products. In doing this, the parties are developing forms of contracting beyond the …

Sequential Innovation, Patents, And Imitation, James Bessen, Eric Maskin

Faculty Scholarship

How could such industries as software, semiconductors, and computers have been so innovative despite historically weak patent protection? We argue that if innovation is both sequential and complementary--as it certainly has been in those industries--competition can increase firms' future profits thus offsetting short-term dissipation of rents. A simple model also shows that in such a dynamic industry, patent protection may reduce overall innovation and social welfare. The natural experiment that occurred when patent protection was extended to software in the 1980?s provides a test of this model. Standard arguments would predict that R&D intensity and productivity should have increased among …

Accounting For Productivity Growth When Technical Change Is Biased, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Solow (1957) decomposed labor productivity growth into two components that are independent under Hicks neutrality: input growth and the residual, representing technical change. However, when technical change is Hicks biased, input growth is no longer independent of technical change, leading to ambiguous interpretation. Using Solow's model, I decompose output per worker into globally independent sources and show that technical bias directly contributes to labor productivity growth above what is captured in the Solow residual. This contribution is sometimes large, generating rates of total technical change that substantially exceed the Solow residual, prompting a reinterpretation of some well-known studies.