Are Patent Settlements Anti-Competitive?

Settlements of disputes allowing parties to find a mutually acceptable compromise are a legitimate way to end private disagreements. The …

Secrecy vs. patents. How to choose?

Because they blossom in winter and display striking red and green colors, poinsettias are ideal for Christmas decorating. Yet, …

Mixing patents and trade secrets for complex innovations

  In our latest working paper, Francis Bloch and myself analyze the optimal protection strategy for an innovator of a complex …

Fixing the software patent problem

In an article published  the New York Times on October 7, 2012, Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr give a critical view of …

Les corsaires de brevets

Ils mènent une guerre sans merci, en défendant les brevets d’autrui. (Cet article a été publié dans La Libre Belgique …

Beware! Privateers patrol these patent waters.

In 1572, Queen Elizabeth I of England commissioned Francis Drake to sail for America and encouraged him to plunder …

A typology of IP intermediaries

(Updated in November 2014) As we have already argued a couple of times on this blog (see here and …

Good IP tidings we bring…

    As Christmas is drawing nigh, I found it fun appropriate to collect a number of “IP Xmas …

Commercialization strategies for start-ups: Examples

In a previous post, I asked my students to illustrate the typology that Gans & Stern (2003) proposed for …

Is the saving of genetically modified seeds allowed? A patent issue to be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court

Last October, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take a case on the exhaustion of patent for genetically-modified (GM) …