Top 10 IP Paper Downloads

Over at TaxProf Blog (which has interesting posts about legal education as well as about tax law), Paul Caron has been posting weekly updates of the Top 5 Recent Tax Paper Downloads. Because I am rarely able to read and review IP papers as fast as they are posted on SSRN, I am going to begin doing the same for the IP papers that received the most SSRN downloads in the past 60 days. This week, I'll list the whole top 10:

1. [880 downloads]  Therasense v. Becton Dickinson: A First Impression, by Jason Rantanen (Iowa Law) & Lee Petherbridge (Loyola Law).
2. [183 downloads]  Legislative Alternatives to the Google Book Settlement, by Pamela Samuelson (Berkeley Law). 
3. [172 downloads]  The Myth of the Sole Inventor, by Mark A. Lemley (Stanford Law).
4. [161 downloads]  Just Google it! - The Google Book Search Settlement: A Law and Economics Analysis, by Frank Müller-Langer (Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law) & Marc Scheufen (University of Hamburg Institute of Law & Economics).
5. [153 downloads]  Building a Collaborative Digital Collection, a Necessary Evolution in Libraries, by Michelle M. Wu (Georgetown Law).
6. [112 downloads]  New Licensing Models for Online Music Services in the European Union: From Collective to Customized Management, by Giuseppe Mazziotti (Copenhagen Law).
7. [106 downloads]  Evergreening, Patent Challenges, and Effective Market Life in Pharmaceuticals, by C. Scott Hemphill (Columbia Law) & Bhaven N. Sampat (Columbia Health Policy & Management).
8. [100 downloads]  Accessing Truth: Marketplaces of Ideas in the Information Age, by Nima Darouian (Loyola JD 2010).
9. [98 downloads]  The French Revolution 2.0: Copyright and the Three Strikes Policy, by Eldar Haber (Tel Aviv Law Ph.D. Candidate).
10. [94 downloads]  Copyright Law and the Commoditization of Sex, by Ann Bartow (Pace Law).

Of course, there are many problems with using SSRN downloads as a measure of quality, especially since downloads can be heavily influenced by factors like whether the author is able to promote the paper on a widely read blog. For example, Rantanen & Petherbridge probably skyrocketed to the top of this list after Rantanen posted about their article on Patently-O. (Did I mention that you can download my latest article here?) But while the difference between 800 downloads and 100 downloads might not tell you much about the quality of the piece, I think the difference between 100 downloads and 2 downloads is a useful signal.