Patent Markets: A Framework for Evaluation

Michael J. Burstein. Patents have become financial assets. They are valued like securities, traded like stocks, and modeled as options. Our discourse about patents increasingly draws from finance. Firms whose business models depend on patent assertion explain that they are…
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Patent Pledges

Jorge L. Contreras. An increasing number of firms are making public pledges to limit the enforcement of their patents. In doing so, they are entering a little-understood middle ground between the public domain and exclusive property rights. The best-known of…
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Against Design

Caryn Devins, Roger Koppl, Stuart Kauffman & Teppo Felin. Institutions and the incentives they create can be designed or redesigned to produce desired outcomes. But design does not work if social and economic dynamics are “creative.” If it is impossible to…
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Big Conflicts Little Conflicts

Katherine Florey. Choice-of-law doctrine today increasingly presents two distinct faces. When it comes to garden-variety tort and contract cases, conflicts doctrine often produces uncontroversial results with surprisingly little drama. In more complicated litigation, however, the picture is starkly different. It…
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Google Glass While Driving

Adam M. Gershowitz. Is it legal to use Google Glass while driving? Most states ban texting while driving and a large number also forbid drivers from being able to see television and video screens. But do these statutes apply to…
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Time to Reboot?: DMCA 2.0

Donald P. Harris. Imagine this scenario. Mary Saint Francis was a longtime librarian of limited means. She had always dreamed of becoming a successful writer and living the way “the other half” lived, retiring from the library and traveling around…
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