Interesting historical look at patent-pools and ‘transaction entrepreneurs’ by USC law professor Jonathan Barnet leads him to the conclusion that the “anti-commons” concerns in the patent context don’t hold weight in practice. IP scholars and policymakers often maintain that [anti-commons] effects are endemic in IP-governed markets and therefore tend to endorse the view that IP rights should be reduced to mitigate those effects. The descriptive component of that proposition cannot be reconciled with the clear weight of contemporary and historical evidence—covering more than a century’s worth of experience—that AC effects are repeatedly mitigated through independent market action by affected constituencies or transactional entrepreneurs. This is true both in concentrated markets, in which repeat-players have incentives and capacities to converge on a knowledge-sharing arrangement, and dispersed markets, in which…
↧