Networks, Standards and Intellectual Property Rights

This paper reviews issues that lie at the intersection between intellectual property rights (IPR) and network effects, especially in the context of the global economy. Some of the relevant questions are: (1) How do IPR influence the provision of goods exhibiting network effects? (2) How do network effects in turn influence the creation of intellectual property? And (3) how do aspects of the global economy interact with both IPR and network effects? We synthesize what is known from the existing literature to answer these questions.Intellectual Property Rights, Network Effects, Globalization, Standards, Social Networks, Software Piracy

Economic Analysis, Public Policy and the Software Industry

This paper focuses on three related matters. It analyses the process of competition in the software industry, this being important both in itself and for the light it throws on competition within all industries characterised by low or zero marginal costs and a high rate of technical development. The software industry, operating under private enterprise, is dependent on copyright, and the issues raised by intellectual property protection are therefore also considered. Given the need for inter-operability between different software products, and between these and associated hardware, standardisation is important within the industry, and the processes by which standards may be established are evaluated. Consideration is given to the public policy issues that are raised by these three topics.Software, competition, innovation, standardisation, intellectual property protection

Improving interoperability by encouraging the sharing of interface specifications

3D CAD software is vital to record design information. The industry is oligopolistic and despite standards has all the elements associated with a lack of interoperability, namely proprietary software, network effects and lock-in. Interfaces are similar to standards and their indirect effect amplifies their impact and value and distorts the intended intellectual property protection. The distributed machine code is not readable and the restrictions on reverse engineering are tantamount to making the information a statutory trade secret. The regulation of interoperability is a balancing act between control by rightsholders and openness of interfaces. Identifying the ‘pivot’ point must take account of the software’s functional nature and data integrity. Existing proposals are evaluated and recommendations with least intervention that encourage market solutions are made. These involve a modest and doctrinally appropriate amendment to Article 6 of the Software Directive to legitimise the sharing of interface specifications obtained by decompilation and to encourage the use of a public register to improve dissemination

Copyright Misuse and Modified Copyleft: New Solutions to the Challenges of Internet Standardization

The Internet is a truly global community within which myriad economic, social and technological forces interplay to cause its standardization. Much of the competition in the industry has revolved around which product will become the standard for a given market sector. Some markets have seen victors; for example, TCP/IP is the Internet communication protocol, MP3 appears to be dominating music compression, and Microsoft Corporation\u27s Windows ( Windows ) is clearly the standard operating system. Similarly, the Internet must adopt a standard for web browsing and searching, for email, and for web programming. In many cases, the competition for this standard will be fierce, because the winner likely will have intellectual property rights in the technology and hence reap a significant reward. Such incentives often are needed for the development of objectively good standards. Yet, as a consequence of granting intellectual property rights, a monopoly is created in a product that Internet users need. Once an Internet technology becomes a standard, how can the owner of the corresponding copyright be prevented from extracting monopoly rents and thereby negating the increase in consumer welfare that the standard created

The economics of standards: public policy and market performance

Economic conditions ; Payment systems

Reverse Engineering of Software for Interoperability and Analysis

The rapid evolution of computer technology raises difficult questions about the scope of protection the law should afford computer programs. Computer programs are uniquely different from traditional literary works protected by the copyright laws, because they have machine-like properties, are primarily functional in nature, and frequently are distributed in a form that humans cannot read. Despite these differences, however, computer programs have received protection under the copyright paradigm along with literary and artistic works. The United States historically has employed a highly protectionist approach to computer programs, as evidenced by early software infringement decisions in which courts slowly expanded protection by prohibiting copying of not only the literal or tangible aspects of computer programs but also the nonliteral elements. Recently, some courts have made an underlying shift in their interpretation of legal doctrine and policy from a broad standard of infringement that favors software copyright owners to a more narrow standard

The interaction between antitrust and intellectual property : the interoperability issue in the Microsoft Europe case

The present work analyzes the interaction between antitrust policy and intellectual property protection, with particular reference to the cases of refusal to supply, when it concerns ideas or inventions protected by an IP right. For this purpose, the paper preliminarily discusses the governing principles of antitrust policy on abuse of dominance and refusal to deal, as they have been implemented in the decisions of the EU Competition Authority, and it presents the specific issues related to the implementation of antitrust policy in the innovative industries. Then, the paper examines in particular the Microsoft Europe Case, as decided by the European Commission in 2004, focusing on the issue of the interoperability between the operating systems for personal computers and the operating systems for work group servers. The theoretical model, developed as an extension of the framework proposed by Choi and Stefanadis (2001) to the case of refusal to deal, suggests an explanation of the case, alternative to the one adopted by the Commission, if not necessarily in the final outcome of the decision, at least in the analytical arguments and in the dynamics of the market structure. In particular, we show that the refusal to supply the compatibility between the two complementary products was determined not only by the intention to leverage its dominant position to the adjacent market of server operating systems, but especially by the concern for keeping the monopoly on its core market, that is the one of PC operating system, given the future evolution of the software market, due to the diffusion of cloud computing