(This is an updated and slightly modified version of this post, published on April 25, 2012.) In April 2012, Lucy Koh, a US District Court Judge, tried to force a truce on one of the fiercest fronts of what is now commonly known as the “Smartphone Patent Wars”. She ordered Tim Cook and Choi Gee-Sung, […]
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Browser War: The Return
By 10 November 2013 0
This is the fourth post adapted from term papers that my master students submitted in June 2013. This post (originally written by Fanny Avaux, Maxime Georgin, Marie-Laure Le Déodic & Sophie Naert) has been honed and complemented by Olivier Simons. The first browser war took place in the late 1990s when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer replaced Netscape’s […]
Markets for technologies: do they really work?
By 6 November 2013 40
It is widely agreed that one of the main economic roles of IP law is to create exclusive rights: exclusivity allows innovators to appropriate the returns from their invention and it is the prospect of such returns that gives them the incentives to engage in innovative activities in the first place. It is important to stress […]
What is the future of BlackBerry?
By 20 September 2013 4
This is the second post adapted from term papers that my master students submitted in June 2013. This post (originally written by Loïc Esselen, Zhang Hong, Sebastian Malmport and Vianney Picavet) has been polished and complemented by Olivier Simons. Once Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry, has been market leader in […]
Building on Batibouw to understand two-sided platforms (2)
By 25 August 2013 0
I start here a series of posts that are adapted from term papers that my master students submitted in June 2013. I have asked Olivier Simons, a former student of mine, to polish these papers and complement them with his own insights. This post (originally written by Thibaut Debruxelles, Pascaline Renard, Daniel Scurtu and Marielle […]
Will we all soon be hooked on MOOCs? (1) Introduction
By 3 April 2013 0
I have been willing to devote a blog post to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) for quite some time now, but I never found the energy, nor the right timing to do so (the only step I took was to propose the “market for MOOCs” as a master thesis topic for students of the […]
Will we all soon be hooked on MOOCs? (2) Business models
By 3 April 2013 3
This post is the second of a series of three posts written by Julien Jacqmin. Julien Jacqmin is a PhD student in Economics from the Economics School of Louvain, and is affiliated with the CEREC/Université Saint-Louis – Brussels. Julien’s dissertation is on the economics of education/science and on higher education policy. As an expert on these questions, he is well […]
Will we all soon be hooked on MOOCs? (3) Educational technology and prospectives
By 3 April 2013 0
This post is the third of a series of three posts written by Julien Jacqmin. Julien Jacqmin is a PhD student in Economics from the Economics School of Louvain, and is affiliated with the CEREC/Université Saint-Louis – Brussels. Julien’s dissertation is on the economics of education/science and on higher education policy. As an expert on these questions, he is well […]
A typology of IP intermediaries
By 26 March 2013 15
(Updated in November 2013) As we have already argued a couple of times on this blog (see here and here), markets for patents are typically difficult to organize. There are three main reasons as to why markets for patents work badly: Many uncertainties surround the value of patents. This is mainly because patents are idiosyncratic (and […]
Nike+ and its competitors: a running battle?
By 6 March 2013 27
For a few years now, Nike has been operating, in collaboration with Tomtom and Apple, a series of devices that allow walkers and runners to record and follow various parameters related to their walk or run history (like distance, speed, burned calories, …). The concept is the following: the runner trains with a GPS sportwatch […]