Moretti & Wilson: Do State Incentives for Innovation Work?

Do state incentives for innovation work? As I recently discussed in a short presentation at IP Scholars on August 8, state and local incentives for innovation, from R&D tax credits to competitive awards for research or commercialization, have become increasingly common as states attempt to build regional "clusters" of innovation like Silicon Valley. Due to the importance of proximity and localized knowledge spillovers in generating innovation, in theory, state and local innovation incentives that result in self-sustaining "clusters" of innovation could have significant effects on patenting activity and other measures of innovation.

Introducing New Blogger: Camilla Hrdy

I am delighted to welcome Camilla Hrdy as a new Written Description blogger for the coming year. Camilla is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Yale Law School Information Society Project, and her research has focused on the role of state and local governments as generators of innovation policy—including the provocative argument that U.S. states can and should offer state patents as a way of incentivizing local innovation and promoting experimentation and bottom-up patent reform. I look forward to hearing her thoughts on recent (or classic) IP and innovation scholarship!

Gugliuzza: How far will the Federal Circuit go?

Does the Federal Circuit really ignore patent policy, as many of the court's judges have claimed?  In The Federal Circuit as a Federal Court, 54 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1791 (2013), Paul R. Gugliuzza describes the Federal Circuit's tendency for self-aggrandizement in its relationships with state courts, the PTO, district courts, and regional circuits.  In each of these relationships, Gugliuzza argues, the Federal Circuit has consolidated power by the citing objectives of uniformity and expert adjudication in patent law.

Merges: Classic Patent Scholarship

The next contribution to the Classic Patent Scholarship Project is from Professor Robert Merges at Berkeley Law, another giant in intellectual property law. Merges has authored a number of articles that have already made the "classics" list, as well as others that deserve to be there; for example, Contracting into Liability Rules: Intellectual Property Rights and Collective Rights Organizations, 84 Calif. L. Rev. 1293 (1996), provides an early discussion of transaction costs in IP thickets that is highly relevant to contemporary problems such as "royalty stacking" in the mobile phone wars. Merges also has recently written Justifying Intellectual Property (which was subject to a terrific book club over at PrawfsBlawg), and he is well known to law students as the author of popular intellectual property and internet law casebooks. Here is his list of classics, "some well known and others that may have been lost in the mists of time." There are many suggestions here that have not been mentioned by any of the prior contributors, which I will add to the compiled list.

New IP Scholarship on SSRN

There are far more interesting IP papers posted than I have time to read carefully and blog about, so I thought I'd just highlight some recently posted papers that caught my eye (which I have also tweeted):

Ford on Invalidity vs. Noninfringement

I'm in NYC for the IP Scholars Conference (IPSC) at Cardozo Law, and one of the (many) article presentations I'm really looking forward to is Patent Invalidity Versus Noninfringement (forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review), by Roger Ford (Bigelow Fellow at Chicago, @rford). Ford argues that patent defendants are more likely to argue noninfringement than invalidity, and that this imbalance exacerbates the problem of bad patents. This article is well worth a look, both because it is a fun read (peppered with examples from actual patents) and, more importantly, because the basic insight seems right.