At the NBER Summer Institute there was an interesting panel session on patent reform. One of the issues was the speed and cost of the patent examination process. The usual intuition is that we want this to be as speedy and thorough as possible but that is a goal that is unlikely given budget constraints. …
Step right up, sell Google your patents
One of my longest research projects has been centered on the market for ideas — the idea that innovators can sell their ideas to others rather than take them to markets themselves. The problem is that while conceptually something like a market for ideas sounds like a good idea where exactly it is has been …
Do patents stifle cumulative innovation?
There has been a movement that began with the notion of the anti-commons that suggested that, whatever the other benefits and faults might be with the patent system, a fault that really matters for the operation of the system and for growth prospects (a la endogenous growth theory) is how patents might stifle cumulative or …
Intellectual Property Strategy as PR
My colleague, Alberto Galasso has a post at HBR on whether Apple's patent wars are a PR rather than a legal strategy. The first one is the marketing effect of IP litigation. “Apple says Samsung copied iPhone” was the typical news headline during the first weeks of litigation. The case was not only mentioned on specialized …
Private Anti-Patent Enforcement
One thing that intrigues me are 'grass roots' movements to sanction behaviour. I'm presenting a paper about this in scholarly publishing at the forthcoming American Economic Association meetings. However, here I wanted to talk about a skirmish that happened over the last few days in the app economy. A couple of weeks ago, a small …
Five shades of grey on Apple-Samsung
The big IP news this week was the verdict in the Apple-Samsung trial. The jury found (mostly) in favour of Apple in its claims that Samsung had copied patented technology. There were many patents that were under consideration but the ones that appear to have been most significant were the ones that related to the …
Patent Reform without Congress
Paul Graham is an accomplished entrepreneur and is the founder of Y-Combinator — perhaps the most successful of the start-up incubator projects in recent times. (Here is a write-up from Wired.) His essays and thoughts about the tech sector are always worth reading. Graham's latest focus is patent reform. Why does the patent system need reforming? Well, just listen to …
Smart phone patents and platform wars
Firms in the smartphone market have been suing one another over patent violations. I cannot recall any other platform war that involved as many intellectual property disputes. Look, society grants patents as part of trade-off. A patent enhances the incentives to generate new invention by giving the inventor a temporary monopoly. That trade-off should never …
Digitopoly 