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Full-Text Articles in Law

Essential Facilities Doctrine And China’S Anti-Monopoly Law, Yong Huang, Elizabeth Xiao-Ru Wang, Xin Roger Zhang Aug 2014

Essential Facilities Doctrine And China’S Anti-Monopoly Law, Yong Huang, Elizabeth Xiao-Ru Wang, Xin Roger Zhang

Elizabeth Xiao-Ru Wang

No abstract provided.


Short-Circuiting Contract Law: The Federal Circuit's Contract Law Jurisprudence And Intellectual Property Federalism, Shubha Ghosh Aug 2014

Short-Circuiting Contract Law: The Federal Circuit's Contract Law Jurisprudence And Intellectual Property Federalism, Shubha Ghosh

Shubha Ghosh

The Federal Circuit was established in 1982 as an appellate court with limited jurisdiction over patent claims. However, the Federal Circuit has used this limited jurisdiction to expand its reach into contract law, developing a federal common law of contract. Given the growing importance of patent litigation in the past three decades, this creation of an independent body of contract law creates uncertainty in transactions involving patents. This troublesome development received attention in Stanford v Roche, a 2011 Supreme Court decision upholding the Federal Circuit's invalidation of a patent assignment to Stanford University. This Article documents the development of …


The Fashion Lottery: Cooperative Innovation In Stochastic Markets, Jonathan Barnett, Gilles Grolleau, Sana El Harbi May 2014

The Fashion Lottery: Cooperative Innovation In Stochastic Markets, Jonathan Barnett, Gilles Grolleau, Sana El Harbi

Jonathan M Barnett

The fashion market is an anomaly: innovation is vigorous but original producers are substantially unprotected against imitation, which proliferates under an incomplete property regime consisting of strong trademark protections and weak design protections. We account for this anomaly through a “cooperative innovation” model where producers prefer an incomplete property regime that permits some imitation to alternative regimes that permit no imitation or all imitation, independent of budget constraints. A property regime that permits positive but limited levels of imitation operates as a form of group insurance that alleviates the risk of recoupment failure in a market characterized by demand uncertainty, …


The Host's Dilemma: Strategic Forfeiture In Platform Markets For Informational Goods, Jonathan M. Barnett May 2014

The Host's Dilemma: Strategic Forfeiture In Platform Markets For Informational Goods, Jonathan M. Barnett

Jonathan M Barnett

Voluntary forfeiture of intellectual assets—often, exceptionally valuable assets--is surprisingly widespread in information technology markets. A simple economic rationale can account for these practices. By giving away access to core technologies, a platform holder commits against expropriating (and thereby induces) user investments that support platform value. To generate revenues that cover development and maintenance costs, the platform holder must regulate access to other goods and services within the total consumption bundle. The tradeoff between forfeiting access (to induce adoption) and regulating access (to recover costs) anticipates the substantial convergence of open and closed innovation models. Organizational patterns in the software and …


Intellectual Property As A Law Of Organization, Jonathan M. Barnett May 2014

Intellectual Property As A Law Of Organization, Jonathan M. Barnett

Jonathan M Barnett

The incentive thesis for patents is challenged by the existence of alternative means by which firms can capture returns on innovation. Taking into account patent alternatives yields a robust reformulation of the incentive thesis as mediated by organizational form. Patents enable innovators to make efficient selections of firm scope by transacting with least-cost suppliers of commercialization inputs. These expanded transactional opportunities reduce the minimum size of the market into which any innovator—or the supplier of any other technological or production input—can attempt entry. Disaggregation of the innovation and commercialization process then induces the formation of secondary markets in disembodied technology …


Property As Process: How Innovation Markets Select Innovation Regimes, Jonathan M. Barnett May 2014

Property As Process: How Innovation Markets Select Innovation Regimes, Jonathan M. Barnett

Jonathan M Barnett

It is commonly asserted that innovation markets suffer from excessive intellectualproperty protections, which in turn stifle output. But empirical inquiries can neither confirm nor deny this assertion. Under the “agnostic” assumption that we cannot assess directly whether intellectual-property coverage is excessive, an alternative query is proposed: can the market assess if any “propertization outcome” is excessive and then undertake actions to yield a socially preferable outcome? Grounded in the “bottom up” methodology of new institutional economics, this process-based approach takes the view that innovator populations make rent-seeking investments that continuously “select” among a range of “innovation regimes” that trade off …


The Evolution Of Intellectual Property Protections In The People’S Republic Of China: Is There An Enforcement Problem?, William Mcguire, Michael Wotherspoon Jan 2014

The Evolution Of Intellectual Property Protections In The People’S Republic Of China: Is There An Enforcement Problem?, William Mcguire, Michael Wotherspoon

William McGuire

No abstract provided.