Private Agreements for Coordinating Patent Rights: The Case of Patent Pools

Inventors and users of technology often enter into cooperative agreements for sharing their intellectual property in order to implement a standard or to avoid costly infringement litigation. Over the past two decades, U.S. antitrust authorities have viewed pooling arrangements that integrate complementary, valid and essential patents to have “pro-competitive benefits†in reducing prices, transactions costs, and the incidence of costly infringement suits. Since patent pools are cooperative agreements, they also have the potential of suppressing competition if, for example, they harbor weak or invalid patents, dampen incentives to conduct research on innovations that compete with the pooled patents, foreclose competition from downstream product or upstream innovation markets, or raise prices on goods that compete with the pooled patents. In synthesizing the ideas advanced in the economic literature, this paper explores whether these antitrust concerns apply to pools with complementary patents. Special attention is given to the U.S. Department of Justice-Federal Trade Commission Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property (1995) and its application to recent patent pool cases.Patent pools, intellectual property, antitrust economics

Intellectual Property: When Is It the Best Incentive System?

Our objective in this paper is to review what economists have said about incentive schemes to promote R&D, including intellectual property. While we focus on environments in which other forms of protection are not available, we note that other protections can obviate the need for any formal reward system. In Section II, we compare intellectual property to alternative incentive schemes. In Section III we review optimal design issues for intellectual property, especially the question of patent breadth, and in Section IV we turn to the special problems that arise when innovation is cumulative. In Section V, we summarize the arguments for and against intellectual property. We comment on whether the design recommendations of economists can actually be implemented, and argue that IP regimes should be designed so that the subject matter of each one has relatively homogeneous needs for protection.

From Philly to Fayetteville: Reflections on Teaching Criminal Law in the First Year...Four Years Later

This piece briefly explores the Criminal Law course and specifically reflects on my experience teaching the course over the past four years. Readers of this piece might first enjoy reading this piece\u27s predecessor at 83 Temp. L. Rev. 475

Herding Bullfrogs towards a More Balanced Wheelbarrow: An Illustrative Recommendation for Federal Sentencing Post-Booker

The Article argues in favor of shifting the balance in federal sentencing toward a more indeterminate system. By exploring the post-Booker legal landscape at both the federal and state levels, the Article asserts that the judiciary\u27s continued reliance on the “advisory Guidelines has practically changed federal sentencing procedures very little in form or function. Accordingly, the Article proffers that, rather than insisting upon the Guidelines\u27 immutability, federal sentencing would do well to reflect upon its own history, and the evolution of its state counterparts