Explore the vast range of titles available.

We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the trade-offs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at the use of other means of formal intellectual property protection.

\"Focusing on the information economy, free trade exploitation, and confronting terrorist violence, Mark Findlay critiques law's regulatory commodification. Conventional legal regulatory modes such as theft and intellectual property are being challenged by waves of property access and use, which demand the rethinking of property 'rights' and their relationships with the law. Law's Regulatory Relevance? theorises how the law should reposition itself in order to help rather than hinder new pathways of market power, by confronting the dominant neo-liberal economic model that values property through scarcity. With in-depth analysis of empirical case studies, the author explores how law is returning to its communal utility in strengthening social ties, which will in turn restore property as social relations rather than market commodities. In a world of contested narratives about property valuing, law needs to ground its inherent regulatory relevance in the ordering of social change. This book is an essential read for students of law and regulation wanting to explore the contemporary dissent against neo-liberal market economies and the issues of communitarian governance and social resistance. It will also appeal to policy makers interested in law's failing regulatory capacity, particularly through criminalising attacks on conventional property rights, by offering insights into why law's regulatory relevance is at a cross-roads.\"-- Provided by publisher.

China is not meeting its international obligations to protect intellectual property rights (IPRs), harming the innovation process in China and elsewhere. We review the benefits of IPR protection and discuss the magnitude and cost of China's IPR violations. We also emphasize that these violations undermine the international rule of law and impair China's legitimacy as a leader in evolving global governance institutions. We criticize the argument that China will endogenously improve IPR protection due to internal pressures from its domestic IP sector as the United States and some other countries did in the past. China's governance institutions are very different from those of the liberal Western democracies, past and present, as China has a weak internal rule of law, a fragmented governance system, and cultural traditions that favor collective over individual rights. As China's IP sector develops, its IPR governance regime might even be used as a strategic tool to further disadvantage foreign IPR holders. We argue that China should play a lead role in any international IPR reforms but that it must first establish legitimacy by meeting its current international IPR commitments. We conclude that other countries should take action to pressure China to meet its IPR obligations.

\"This Very Short Introduction surveys the key issues and controversies surrounding global intellectual property law and policy, considering the effects global standardization is having on both developed and developing nations and the relationships among them. Noted cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan helps clarify both the basic terms and the major conflicts surrounding the fascinating and controversial idea of intellectual property\"-- Provided by publisher.

This Article addresses the stakes of the ongoing fight over competing versions of U.S. history for our understanding of law, with a special focus on property law. Insofar as legal scholarship has examined U.S. law within the historical context in which it arose, it has largely overlooked the role that laws and legal institutions played in facilitating the production of the two preeminent market commodities in the colonial and early Republic periods: expropriated lands and enslaved people. Though conquest and enslavement were key to producing property for centuries, property-law scholars have constructed the field of property law to be largely devoid of these histories and without a strong conception of the formative role of race. As a result, recent movements to reintegrate these topics into the field generally reflect a broader trend in the legal academy of treating race as an elective rather than fundamental topic. This Article shows that these histories contain insights that are crucial for understanding their legacies in our present legal system. It offers an account of how current conceptions of the field of property law evolved and what we learn from suppressed histories. It shows that the histories of conquest and slavery explain aspects of the system – its construction of jurisdictions, property value, ground-level institutions, and organization of force, for example – that belong at the core of the curriculum and the field. First, this Article examines patterns of erasure in the property-law canon to explore how we came to understand property law as primarily a collection of doctrines derived from English law regulating relations between neighbors. It uses property-law casebooks as an index and offers the first comprehensive study of the tradition. This analysis shows that many of the norms of erasure and validations of racial hierarchy that casebooks exhibit were set during the period of their emergence – the time of the formal close of the frontier and the Jim Crow Era. It was not until the 1970s that casebooks began to critically examine the histories of conquest and slavery for the first time, but the query into their consequences for the property system has remained partial and inconsistent. I then examine three ubiquitously taught topics in property law–discovery, labor, and possession – in light of the contexts in which they arose, to highlight their role in the creation of new markets for land and people in early America. I show that Chief Justice Marshall's iteration of the Discovery Doctrine drew from an international legal tradition that authorized European conquests and the transatlantic slave trade to establish racial hierarchy as the basis of U.S. jurisdiction and trade in lands. In addition to affirming that hierarchy, as scholars have shown, the labor theory also captured the ways that colonists attributed property values to land and people only when they came into white possession. I further argue that the labor of property creation in the colonies in significant part comprised legal work, beyond agriculture labor, including the passage of laws creating homesteading incentives, making enslavement racial, permanent, and hereditary, and establishing systems such as the rectangular survey, comprehensive title registry, and easy mortgage foreclosure. Finally, taking possession of property in this context entailed a process of dispossession turning the principle of honoring possession on its head. Looking at possession as part of the Discovery Rule and fugitive-slave laws reveals that the state largely delegated enforcement of possession – and the concomitant racial violence of dispossession – to private actors in ways that simultaneously invested them in property interests and racial hierarchy. This Article opens a new inquiry into what these long-buried histories teach us about property law. It argues that they are indispensable for understanding the unique fruits of the colonial experiment that define American property law today – the singular land system that underpins its real estate market and its structural reliance on racial violence to produce value.

Contributed articles.

What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: For example, does the existence of strong patent laws encourage innovation? What proportion of innovations is patented? Is this share constant across industries and over time? How does patenting affect the diffusion of knowledge? How effective are prominent mechanisms, such as patent pools and compulsory licensing, that have been proposed to address problems with the patent system? This essay summarizes results of existing research and highlights promising areas for future research.

Using a unique and rich database of high-technology firms in China, we show that effective enforcement of intellectual property rights at the provincial level is critical in encouraging financing and investing in R& D. Better enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights positively affects firms' ability to acquire new external debt and allows firms to invest in more R&D, generate more innovation patents, and produce more sales from new products. Our results suggest that facilitating financing and investing in R&D are the channels through which better IP rights enforcement can affect economic growth.