Intellectual Property Rights and Standard-Setting Organizations

Antitrust, Intellectual Property, and Standard Setting Organizations

The role of institutions in mediating the use of intellectual property rights has long been neglected in debates over the economics of intellectual property. In a path-breaking work, Rob Merges studied what he calls "collective rights organizations," industry groups that collect intellectual property rights from owners and license them as a package. Merges finds that these organizations ease so...

Standard Setting, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Role of Antitrust in Regulating Incomplete Contracts

Standard-setting organizations (SSOs) are of growing importance as an institution for coordinating and facilitating the economic activities of intellectual property rights holders. SSOs thus foster economic benefits of standardization and of commercializing innovation. Market adoption of standards that call for standard-compliant products to use intellectual property rights (IPRs), however, rai...

Protecting Intellectual Property Rights and the JPEG2000 Coding Standard

The ever-increasing use of the Internet and file sharing applications based on Peer to Peer networks has alarmed content authors, providers and resellers of digital content. Techniques proposed for protecting digital media include watermarking, use of metadata and self-protection and self-authentication. In this paper we review the most important of these methods and analyse their potential use...

Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights

We study the determinants of patent suits and their outcomes over the period 1978-1999 by linking detailed information from the U.S. patent office, the federal court system, and industry sources. The probability of being involved in a suit is very heterogeneous, being much higher for valuable patents and for patents owned by individuals and smaller firms. Thus the patent system generates incent...

Intellectual Property Rights