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Full-Text Articles in Law
Ip And Antitrust Policy: A Brief Historical Overview, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Ip And Antitrust Policy: A Brief Historical Overview, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The history of IP/antitrust litigation is filled with exaggerated notions of the power conferred by IP rights and imagined threats to competition. The result is that antitrust litigation involving IP practices has seen problems where none existed. To be sure, finding the right balance between maintaining competition and creating incentives to innovate is no easy task. However, the judge in an IP/antitrust case almost never needs to do the balancing, most of which is done in the language of the IP provisions. The role of antitrust tribunals is the much more limited one of ensuring that any alleged threat to …
The Perfect Storm: Intellectual Property And Public Values, R. Polk Wagner
The Perfect Storm: Intellectual Property And Public Values, R. Polk Wagner
All Faculty Scholarship
This short conference paper considers how the contemporary discourse surrounding Intellectual property law (especially copyright) may be harming all concerned. That is, because of wildly divergent (and often objectively unsupportable) positions taken by both copyright owners and consumer advocates, the zone of uncertainty in the law has increased. And as uncertainty increases, both sides are hurt. The paper ends with a call for a higher level of discourse, and a query regarding whether all concerned might be better off trading rights for certainty.
Reconsidering The Dmca, R. Polk Wagner
Reconsidering The Dmca, R. Polk Wagner
All Faculty Scholarship
patents, Law and economics, prosecution history estoppel, doctrine of equivalents, ex ante, ex post, default rules, PTO, Federal Circuit, patent prosecution, patent litigation, intellectual property, patent reform, patent administration, patent office
Towards A Differentiated Products Theory Of Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo
Towards A Differentiated Products Theory Of Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The well-known “access-incentives” tradeoff that lies at the heart of the standard economic analysis of copyright follows largely from the assumption that copyright turns authors into monopolists. If one instead analyzes copyright through a framework that allows for product differentiation and entry, the access-incentives tradeoff becomes less significant. By increasing producer appropriability and profit, increased copyright protection can stimulate entry of competitors producing similar works, which in turn results in lower prices, increased product variety, and increased access. This approach would also broaden set of available policy instruments, although disentangling the effects of one from another can be quite complicated.