خرید و دانلود نسخه کامل کتاب Enforcing and Trading Patents: Evidence for Europe – Original PDF

Patents are regarded as a key policy instrument to spur innovation and technological progress, based on the social bargain that inventors disclose their novel and nonobvious invention to the public in return for temporary exclusion rights to use the invention. The artificial market power a patent confers upon the inventor with inevitable loss of public welfare represents a fundamental market intervention of the state. Not surprisingly, since the beginning of mod- ern economic thought, scholars have therefore been pondering over the costs and benefits of patents to society. 1 While early scholars focused primarily on the fundamental issue whether intellectual prop- erty rights should exist at all, research has become more and more nuanced over the last century. Starting with the seminal work of Nordhaus (1969), who was the first to consider the length of patent protection a variable parameter in patent policy, questions on the optimal patent length and scope have become a focus of attention (e.g., Gilbert and Shapiro, 1990). However, these models, looking at one isolated invention, have not kept up with the chang- ing technology and patent landscape. First, inventions have become increasingly cumulative, meaning that a patent on one invention has externalities on the incentives for subsequent re- search (Scotchmer, 1991). Second, products have become more complex, comprising multiple components covered by patents in often fragmented ownership (Shapiro, 2001). In this con- text, negotiations on how innovation rents are to be divided between the different parties are necessary to avoid market failure. However, these negotiations may be complicated, because patents are not always perfectly defined property rights (Merges, 1994). In fact, patents can be subject to significant uncertainty regarding their scope and validity (Lemley and Shapiro, 2005). First, patent boundaries can be vague for new technologies or abstract inventions, such as biotechnology, business methods, and software (Bessen and Meurer, 2008).