Law plays a central, but under-appreciated role in knowledge work. While economic and policy scholars debate the way in which changing legal institutions, particularly expanding property rights, shape the daily lives of knowledge workers, lawyers, with their contracts and concerns, are not key actors on the stage of detailed ethnographies of knowledge work. We reconcile these alternatives argui...

Innovation and the adoption of new ideas is fundamental to economic progress. Here we examine the underlying economics of the market for ideas. From a positive perspective, we examine how such markets function with and without government intervention. From a normative perspective, we examine the pitfalls of existing institutions, and how they might be improved. We highlight recent research by u...

Claiming intellectual property for an invention by patents is a common way to protect ideas and technological advancements. However, patents allow only the protection of new ideas. Assessing the novelty of filed patent applications is a very time-consuming, yet crucial manual task. Current patent retrieval systems do not make use of all available data and do not explain the similarity between p...

Intellectual property (IP) protections proposed by the United States for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) have sparked widespread alarm about the potential negative impact on access to affordable medicines. The most recently leaked draft of the IP chapter shows some shifts in the US position, presumably in response to ongoing resistance from other countries. While some problematic...

In this Article, we propose a way to improve the workings of the patent system. Unlike most extant reform proposals that focus on the USPTO and the Federal Circuit and the procedures they employ, our proposal is conceptual in nature. We introduce two new intellectual property forms—“quasipatents” and “semi-patents.” Both forms are designed to mitigate the social costs of traditional patents by ...

The paper presents a study to define some of the most important legal topics that need to be included in the Services Sciences’ research agenda. To analyze what sort of legal challenges the forthcoming services will have, an example of advanced service framework, MobiLife Service Framework, is presented. The framework highlights especially challenges in privacy and data protection and intellect...

This paper describes and explains the shift in the database industry’s treatment of downloading as an unwanted byproduct of new technology to a product feature in terms of shifts in ―use-regimes,‖ or changes to market practices, legal rules, user expectations and technology-based tools that shape the use of intellectual and cultural property. In the early 1980s citation database users did not h...

The article addresses the issue of the ethics of patenting in human embryonic stem (hES) cells. The current stance of the European Patent Office in citing moral objections to patents on hES cells and the monopolistic scope of the Wisconsin Research Alumni Fund/Geron patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office represent twin obstacles to achieving an ethical balance in paten...

This paper argues that macroeconomic models of endogenous growth driven by technological change could be much improved by drawing lessons from the microeconomic literature of intellectual property design. Growth models use overly simplistic and sometimes incorrect assumptions regarding the intellectual property regime. Microeconomic theory and empirical work are reviewed to demonstrate that det...