What impact do government grants have on small tech firms?

Most academic writing on direct government spending as an innovation policy tool focuses on how this mechanism compares with other policies rather than on the policy choices within the "direct spending" box. For example, in Beyond the Patents–Prizes Debate, Daniel Hemel and I considered a single category of "government grants—a category that includes direct spending on government research laboratories and grants to nongovernment researchers"—with a focus on the similarities among these direct spending mechanisms, and what makes them all different from the other tools in our four-box framework (R&D tax incentives, patents, and inducement prizes).

But we noted that there is variation within each policy box, and that in practice the boxes form a spectrum rather than discrete choices. And it is certainly worth diving within each of the four boxes of our framework from Beyond to dissect these policy tools. There is of course an extensive literature already on optimizing within the "patent" mechanism, but legal innovation scholars pay far less attention to the other boxes, including grants.

Even if one focuses on the most typical grants to academic scientists, there is some interesting research on the effect of different ways of awarding this funding, such as this paper by Azoulay et al. on NIH vs. HHMI grants. But the federal government also provides many other types of direct finding: in 2013, almost one-quarter of federal R&D expenditures went to for-profit firms. How does the theory behind this substantial expenditure of taxpayer funding differ from that for academic research, and what impact does it have in practice?

A recent study from Aleksandar Giga, Andrea Belz, Richard Terrile, and Fernando Zapatero at USC and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech provides some data on the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program as administered by NASA. They find that compared with firms that do not receive these grants, "microfirms" (1-5 employees) with SBIR grants are twice as likely to produce patents and generate twice as many patents. They argue that this is unlikely to be due to a selection effect. They also find that the program does not show the same effect for larger firms, and they suggest that the size limitations for the program should be reconsidered.

Giga et al.'s work focuses on just one corner of the extensive field of direct government science funding, but I hope legal scholars will incorporate empirical work like this to provide a richer understanding of this type of innovation policy.

Natalie Ram: Innovating Criminal Justice

Natalie Ram (Baltimore Law) applies the tools of innovation policy to the problem of criminal justice technology in her latest article, Innovating Criminal Justice (forthcoming in the Northwestern University Law Review), which is worth a read by innovation and criminal law scholars alike. Her dive into privately developed criminal justice technologies—"[f]rom secret stingray devices that can pinpoint a suspect’s location to source code secrecy surrounding alcohol breath test machines, advanced forensic DNA analysis tools, and recidivism risk statistic software"—provides both a useful reminder that optimal innovation policy is context specific and a worrying depiction of the problems that over-reliance on trade secrecy has wrought in this field.

She recounts how trade secrecy law has often been used to shield criminal justice technologies from outside scrutiny. For example, criminal defense lawyers have been unable to examine the source code for TrueAllele, a private software program for analyzing difficult DNA mixtures. Similarly, the manufacturer of Intoxilyzer, a breath test, has fought efforts for disclosure of its source code. But access to the algorithms and other technical details used for generating incriminating evidence is important for identifying errors and weaknesses, increasing confidence in their reliability (and in the criminal justice system more broadly), and promoting follow-on innovations. Ram also argues that in some cases, secrecy may raise constitutional concerns under the Fourth Amendment, the Due Process Clause, or the Confrontation Clause.

Drawing on the full innovation policy toolbox, Ram argues that contrary to the claims of developers of these technologies, trade secret protection is not essential for the production of useful innovation in this field: "The government has at its disposal a multitude of alternative policy mechanisms to spur innovation, none of which mandate secrecy and most of which will easily accommodate a robust disclosure requirement." Patent law, for example, has the advantage of increased disclosure compared with trade secrecy. Although some of the key technologies Ram discusses are algorithms that may not be patentable subject matter post-Alice, to the extent patent-like protection is desirable, regulatory exclusivities could be created for approved (and disclosed) technologies. R&D tax incentives for such technologies also could be conditioned on public disclosure.

But one of Ram's most interesting points is that the main advantage of patents and taxes over other innovation policy tools—eliciting information about the value of technologies based their market demand—is significantly weakened for most criminal justice technologies for which the government is the only significant purchaser. For example, there is little private demand for recidivism risk statistical packages. Thus, to the extent added incentives are needed, this may be a field in which the most effective tools are government-set innovation rewards—grants, other direct spending, and innovation inducement prizes—that are conditioned on public accessibility of the resulting algorithms and other technologies. In some cases, agencies looking for innovations may even be able to collaborate at no financial cost with academics such as law professors or other social scientists who are looking for opportunities to conduct rigorous field tests.

Criminal justice technologies are not the only field of innovation in which trade secrecy can pose significant social costs, though most prior discussions I have seen are focused on purely medical technologies. For instance, Nicholson Price and Arti Rai have argued that secrecy in biologic manufacturing is a major public policy problem, and a number of scholars (including Bob Cook-Deegan et al., Dan Burk, and Brenda Simon & Ted Sichelman) have discussed the problems with secrecy over clinical data such as genetic testing information. It may be worth thinking more broadly about the competing costs and benefits of trade secrecy and disclosure in certain areas—while keeping in mind that the inability to keep secrets does not mean the end of innovation in a given field.

More Classic Patent Scholarship

It has been a while since the last update to my Classic Patent Scholarship, so I thought I would add some works that I view as "classics" but that haven't made it onto the list yet.

First, while the body of "Beyond IP" scholarship is blossoming (see, e.g., the two Yale ISP conferences, where I got to present work with Daniel Hemel), there is a long history of work on innovation incentives beyond patents. For example, Machlup and Penrose (already on the list of classics) describe how the patents-vs-prizes debate dates back to at least the 19th century. Here are two works I would add to the classics list:

• Brian D. Wright, The Economics of Invention Incentives: Patents, Prizes, and Research Contracts, 73 Am. Econ. Rev. 691 (1983).
• Michael Kremer, Patent Buyouts: A Mechanism for Encouraging Innovation, 113 Q.J. Econ. 1137 (1998).

Other important works in this genre, which don't quite fit under my pre-2000 "classic" bar, include Frischmann 2000, Shavell & van Ypersele 2001, Gallini & Scotchmer 2002, and Abramowicz 2003.

As a former grant-funded university researcher (during my physics grad school days), I'm particularly interested in the role of grants and other direct funding as a non-patent incentive, and their overlap with patents through the Bayh–Dole Act. Here are some additional classics in this area:

• Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Proprietary Rights and the Norms of Science in Biotechnology Research, 97 Yale L.J. 177 (1987).
• Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Public Research and Private Development: Patents and Technology Transfer in Government-Sponsored Research, 82 Va. L. Rev. 1663 (1996).
• Arti Kaur Rai, Regulating Scientific Research: Intellectual Property Rights and the Norms of Science, 94 Nw. U. L. Rev. 77 (1999).
• David C. Mowery, Richard R. Nelson, Bhaven N. Sampat & Arvids A. Ziedonis, The Effects of the Bayh-Dole Act on U.S. University Research and Technology Transfer, in Industrializing Knowledge 269 (Lewis M. Branscomb et al. eds., 1999).

Finally, there is now a long strand of literature on the Federal Circuit as an institution and the value of specialized patent adjudication; anyone interested in this area should start with the work of Rochelle Dreyfuss:

• Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, The Federal Circuit: A Case Study in Specialized Courts, 64 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1 (1989).

For other classics—including more extended commentary on them by prominent patent law professors—see the Classic Patent Scholarship page. And if you have suggestions of other pre-2000 works that should be on the list, please add them to the comments on send me an email!

IP and Climate Change

My colleague and friend Josh Sarnoff (DePaul) sent me a review copy of the book he edited: Intellectual Property and Climate Change, even though I told him I wouldn't have much time to look at it. Wouldn't you know, on a quick skim I found it pretty interesting, and thought I would talk about it a bit.

The book is part of the Elgar Research Handbook series. I wrote a chapter that I really like (who am I kidding, I just love that book chapter) in the Research Handbook on Trade Secret Law. But because it's in an expensive book, nobody seems to know about it (and my colleagues in trade secret law will attest that I remind them whenever I review one of their drafts that is remotely in the area of trade secrets and incentives).

So, I thought I would flag this book, so readers would know this is out there. IP will have a growing role in climate change, as this cool story from this week illustrates. The book is comprehensive - it has 26 chapters from a variety of different authors. Some of the topics:

• International law and TRIPS
• Enforcement
• Technology transfer
• Innovation funding and university research
• Antitrust, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks
• Rights in climate data
• Privacy (this one surprised me)
• Standards
• Energy, transportation, food, natural resources

There is something for everyone in this book. Though it is focused on climate change, much of the discussion can be generalized to other emerging areas of law. In that sense, it does present a little bit like the law of the horse, but given that this is a research handbook, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.

Dan Burk on Perverse Innovation

Innovation is the focus of IP law, but innovation is rarely viewed as an end in and of itself—rather, it is desirable because it often leads to economic growth, development, human flourishing, etc. So when might innovation not be desirable? In a new forthcoming article, Perverse Innovation, Professor Dan Burk considers innovations that are purely directed toward exploiting regulatory and legal loopholes. For example:

• Mutagenic chemical or radiation treatments have been used to circumvent the EU's limits on genetically modified crops, even though most scientists would call mutagenic crops "genetically modified" and might think they raise greater concerns than crops created through more controlled recombinant DNA techniques.
• Chrysler's PT Cruiser was created with an innovative "footprint" that allowed it to be regulated under the EPA's rules for "light trucks" rather than "passenger cars."
• Grokster was created to avoid the copyright liability that befell Napster; Aereo's "Rube Goldberg" antennae system was created to fit through a copyright loophole. (Neither attempt was ultimately successful.)

Regulatory circumvention can be concerning not only because these innovations may thwart the regulatory aims, but also because the resources directed toward these innovations might have been better spent elsewhere. Burk argues, however, that some perverse innovation "may prove to be unexpectedly beneficial," and that "[r]ather than try to close the formalist loopholes that prompt perverse innovation, which would likely become an ongoing exercise in futility, regulators might intentionally design loopholes so as to purposefully, rather than haphazardly, promote innovative responses."

Burk explains why these loopholes must be designed such that innovating is "the least costly alternative, with literal compliance, lobbying, and non-compliance following in increasing cost order," and that preventing socially wasteful innovations that serve duplicative ends is best accomplished through "some enforcement rule similar to the patent Doctrine of Equivalents." Of course, Burk acknowledges that designing such loopholes is not easy—and it may end up being as much an exercise in futility as trying to close them in the first place. But it is a tremendously important problem, and I'm glad Burk is shining light on it.

Kiesling & Silberg on Incentives for Rooftop Solar

I've written about innovation policy experimentation and about incentives beyond IP, so I was interested in a new working paper posted by Lynne Kiesling and Mark Silberg, Regulation, Innovation, and Experimentation: The Case of Residential Rooftop Solar. They are not lawyers, but their description of incentives for the development and commercialization of rooftop solar will be of interest to legal scholars of innovation, as it underscores that the role of the state is far more complex than simply providing IP incentives. (Indeed, the paper never mentions IP.)

These incentives include a 30% federal tax credit (set to expire at the end of 2016), as well as many state-level incentives, such as volumentrically reduced subsidies to benefit first movers, net metering policies requiring credits to consumers who produce excess energy, and financial regulations that allow third-party financing to help consumers avoid upfront capital expenses. As they note, "the details matter," and "[n]ot all renewable portfolio standards are equal." This paper seems to nicely encapsulate many of those details.

Rachel Sachs & Becky Eisenberg on Incentives for Diagnostic Tests

I highly recommend two recently posted articles on declining innovation incentives for diagnostic tests, particularly due to changes in patentable subject matter doctrine. In Innovation Law and Policy: Preserving the Future of Personalized Medicine, Rachel Sachs (Petrie-Flom Fellow at Harvard Law) examines the intersection of IP with FDA regulation and health law, joining a growing body of scholarship that seeks to contextualize IP in a broader economic context. Here is the abstract:

Personalized medicine is the future of health care, and as such incentives for innovation in personalized technologies have rightly received attention from judges, policymakers, and legal scholars. Yet their attention too often focuses on only one area of law, to the exclusion of other areas that may have an equal or greater effect on real-world conditions. And because patent law, FDA regulation, and health law work together to affect incentives for innovation, they must be considered jointly. This Article will examine these systems together in the area of diagnostic tests, an aspect of personalized medicine which has seen recent developments in all three systems. Over the last five years, the FDA, Congress, Federal Circuit, and Supreme Court have dealt three separate blows to incentives for innovation in diagnostic tests: they have made it more expensive to develop diagnostics, made it more difficult to obtain and enforce patents on them, and reduced the amount innovators can expect to recoup in the market. Each of these changes may have had a marginal effect on its own, but when considered together, the system has likely gone too far in disincentivizing desperately needed innovation in diagnostic technologies. Fortunately, just as each legal system has contributed to the problem, each system can also be used to solve it. This Article suggests specific legal interventions that can be used to restore an appropriate balance in incentives to innovate in diagnostic technologies.

Diagnostics Need Not Apply is a new essay by Rebecca Eisenberg (UMich Law) that was nicely summed up by Nicholson Price: "let's just admit it - diagnostic tests are unpatentable."

Diagnostic testing helps caregivers and patients understand a patient’s condition, predict future outcomes, select appropriate treatments, and determine whether treatment is working. Improvements in diagnostic testing are essential to bring about the long-heralded promise of personalized medicine. Yet it seems increasingly clear that most important advances in this type of medical technology lie outside the boundaries of patent-eligible subject matter.

The clarity of this conclusion has been obscured by ambiguity in the recent decisions of the Supreme Court concerning patent eligibility. Since its 2010 decision in Bilski v. Kappos, the Court has followed a discipline of limiting judicial exclusions from the statutory categories of patentable subject matter to a finite list repeatedly articulated in the Court’s own prior decisions for “laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas,” while declining to embrace other judicial exclusions that were never expressed in Supreme Court opinions. The result has been a series of decisions that, while upending a quarter century of lower court decisions and administrative practice, purport to be a straightforward application of ordinary principles of stare decisis. As the implications of these decisions are worked out, the Court’s robust understanding of the exclusions for laws of nature and abstract ideas seems to leave little room for patent protection for diagnostics.

This essay reviews recent decisions on patent-eligibility from the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit to demonstrate the obstacles to patenting diagnostic methods under emerging law. Although the courts have used different analytical approaches in recent cases, the bottom line is consistent: diagnostic applications are not patent eligible. I then consider what the absence of patents might mean for the future of innovation in diagnostic testing.

As I have written, I think changes to patentable subject matter doctrine are an important problem for medical innovation, and that policymakers should think seriously about whether additional non-patent innovation incentives are needed in this area.

Innovation Law Beyond IP 2

The second "Innovation Law Beyond IP" conference at Yale Law School is this weekend. I helped organize the first conference last year to provide a space for the growing number of scholars who are thinking about the many legal institutions beyond IP laws that govern knowledge production. I posted a round-up of last year's accompanying blog symposium here.

This year we have another great crop of participants and discussants. I have already cross-posted my contribution to this year's blog symposium, on Intellectual Property as Global Public Finance (coauthored with Daniel Hemel). Here are the other posts written in preparation for the conference, along with a sentence pulled from each, ordered based on the conference agenda:

Intellectual Property as Global Public Finance

I wrote the following post for the Balkinization blog symposium for the upcoming Innovation Law Beyond IP 2 conference at Yale Law School, where I will be presenting an early work-in-progress with Daniel Hemel. You can read my post on Balkinization here, and you can see all posts in the symposium here.

The conventional justification for IP is that information is a public good (i.e., it is nonrival and nonexcludable), and making information excludable through IP allows it to be efficiently supplied by private markets. Both sides of this account have been questioned: not all information has the characteristics of a public good or can be made excludable through IP, and propertization is not the only way the state compensates public-goods providers. As Daniel Hemel and I analyzed in Beyond the Patents–Prizes Debate, the state also encourages information production through mechanisms such as tax incentives and direct spending. And one challenge for domestic innovation policy is recognizing that like conventional public finance mechanisms, IP facilitates a transfer from consumers to innovators, and that the off-budget nature of this IP “shadow” tax should not affect the innovation policy choice.

In Intellectual Property as Global Public Finance, Daniel and I examine information production at the global level, where conventional public finance mechanisms are lacking. Many information goods are global public goods (or quasi-public goods), so under the conventional account, global coordination is needed to prevent countries from free-riding on each other’s information production. Global IP treaties such as the TRIPS Agreement help solve this global coordination problem by requiring countries to contribute to the extent that they use the information produced under IP laws (with defection punished by trade sanctions). And in the global context, the off-budget nature of IP laws may be an asset, as it facilitates creation of this stable Nash equilibrium in a way that maps onto very different national public finance regimes.

If this were the full story, one would expect to find little state investment in non-IP innovation mechanisms for which free-riding cannot be prevented. And yet governments at all levels do invest significant resources beyond IP in producing information goods.

Jessica Silbey's The Eureka Myth

Jessica Silbey (Suffolk Law) has posted an excerpt from the introduction of her new book, The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property (Stanford University Press). Everything I have heard about this project has sounded incredibly interesting, and the introduction has further whetted my appetite to read the book.

She conducted "fifty face-to-face interviews . . . with a wide range of scientists, engineers, musicians and artists, their business associates, and intellectual property lawyers over the course of four years . . . . to learn more about the intersection of intellectual property law on the one hand, and creative and innovative work on the other." "Contrary to the dominant stories of monetary incentives and wealth maximiation, the interviews in this book elaborate intellectual property's diverse functions and sporadic manifestations in the lives and work of artists, scientists, and their business partners and managers."

Silbey has also posted a separate chapter (from the SAGE Handbook of Intellectual Property) based on the same set of qualitative interviews: Promoting Progress: A Qualitative Analysis of Creative and Innovative Production. The chapter "investigates the notion of 'progress' in terms of the motives the interviewees provide for engaging in creative and innovative behavior that is (or could be) protected as intellectual property. Across the interviews, there are common themes that tie together specific notions of progress as related to personal desires as well as public benefits."

Cloned, Cloned Horses, We’ll Ride Them Today (With Profuse Apologies to the Rolling Stones)

The American Quarter Horse is a breed that excels at sprinting over short distances—Quarter Horse races may range from 220 to 870 yards. It is the most popular breed in the United States, and the American Quarter Horse Association (AQHA), headquartered in Amarillo, TX, is the largest horse breed registry in the world. Because of the interest in this breed, Quarter Horses have become the subject of commercial efforts at reproductive cloning. One company, Viagen, has produced over 150 cloned foals. The cloning is achieved via somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the technique that famously created Dolly the Sheep. As some readers may be aware, Dolly was the focus of In re Roslin Institute (Edinburgh), 750 F.3d 1333 (2014), an important patentable subject matter eligibility case decided by the Federal Circuit last May.

Patenting Incentives in Universities

 Dirk Czarnitzki and four coauthors from a variety of institutions have posted Individual Versus Institutional Ownership of University-Discovered Inventions to SSRN. The abstract is short and to the point:

We examine how the ownership of intellectual property rights influences patenting of university-discovered inventions. In 2002, Germany transferred patent rights from faculty members to their universities. To identify the effect on the volume of patenting, we exploit the researcher-level exogeneity of the 2002 policy change using a novel researcher-level panel database that includes a control group not affected by the law change. For professors who had existing industry connections, the policy decreased patenting, but for those without prior industry connections, it increased patenting. Overall, fewer university inventions were patented following the shift from inventor to institutional ownership.

In other words, the authors have used a quasi-experimental event - a change in the law - to see what happens under different legal regimes. They have good data and use it to their benefit: actual patenting by individual researchers, a decent control group that did not experience a change in the law, and information about career and publications to correct for general productivity. I'll discuss the results a bit more after the jump.

McKenna on Sampat on Serendipity

A long running debate in the modeling of innovation is whether discoveries are sure to arise by targeted research investment or by unexpected moments of invention. Suzanne Scotchmer lays out the different models in her book Innovation and Incentives. (Side note: I think every patent scholar should read this book. I would put it on my list of classic patent scholarship, but it's not pre-2000.) I tend to fall in the middle, as I usually do - some advances can be targeted, and some must remain unexpected. I think it is hard to justify a fully path directed model or else, as Scotchmer noted, everything would have been invented one or two hundred years ago. Then again, sometimes things are invented and the world is just not ready for them.

This brings us to serendipity, or rather Serendipity. Serendipity, by Bhaven Sampat (Columbia School of Health) came across my SSRN feed this morning, and I was all ready to write about it when I saw that Mark McKenna (Notre Dame) beat me to it, at Jotwell.

Professor Sampat goes about testing the role of unexpected discovery in pharmaceutical advances. It's an impressive study with impressive results, finding that money spent targeting one disease may often lead to results for other diseases. It also shows that funding in basic science can lead to specific but unexpected results; that's good, because I'm a fan of funding basic science.

I'll say little else other than to point readers to Professor McKenna's summary and analysis, which is thorough and insightful. I only have one addition those remarks. The jotwell discussion focuses on government policy for grants - targeting, amount, gaming, and so forth. I would add that the findings, if we believe them truly to be about serendipity, hold up outside of grant funding and apply to general inventive efforts. So long as there is some incentive mechanism, patents, prizes, grants, etc. that gets people doing research then we might hope to see unexpected spillovers from those research efforts.

Kenney & Mowery: Public Universities and Regional Growth

I've received my new copy of Public Universities and Regional Growth: Insights from the University of California, edited by Martin Kenney and David Mowery. It is an excellent book, demonstrating the complex interactions between university, industry, and government that underlie the unmatched growth in certain sectors of the California region. The book contains numerous case studies of University of California campuses' involvement in major technological developments, including semiconductors and chip and software design at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara, wireless at UC San Diego, and biotechnology at UCSD and UC San Francisco, and more. Each of these campuses became anchors for regional clusters that stimulated economic growth in their respective regions along with advancing science.

Patentable Subject Matter and Non-Patent Innovation Incentives

I just posted my symposium essay from U.C. Irvine's Meaning of Myriad Conference: Patentable Subject Matter and Non-Patent Innovation Incentives. Here is the abstract—comments welcome!

In four patentable subject matter cases in the past five Terms, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the judicially created prohibitions on patenting “abstract ideas” and “nature,” but the boundaries of these exceptions remain highly contested. The dominant justification for these limitations is utilitarian: courts create exemptions in areas where patents are more likely to thwart innovation than to promote it. The resulting debates thus focus on whether patents are needed to provide adequate innovation incentives in disputed fields such as software or genetic research, or whether private incentives such as reputational gains, first-mover advantages, or competitive pressures are sufficient. These debates frequently overlook a significant fact: the absence of patents does not imply that there would be only private incentives. Rather, federal and state governments facilitate financial transfers to researchers through a host of mechanisms—including tax incentives, direct grants and contracts, prizes, and regulatory exclusivity—which already provide substantial research support in the fields where patents are the most controversial.

Paying attention to non-patent incentives could prevent courts from being misled by the concern that a lack of patents for a certain type of invention would remove all incentives for nonobvious and valuable research in that field. Non-patent innovation incentives could also help ease the tension between utilitarian and moral considerations in the current patentable subject matter debates: if many people find patents on certain inventions (such as “human genes”) morally objectionable, utilitarian goals can still be served by using other transfer mechanisms to substitute for the incentive provided by patents. Indeed, non-patent incentives may be more effective than patents in contested areas, where inventors who share moral objections find little incentive in patents, and those who do not still find the patent incentive to be dulled by the persistent uncertainty that has plagued patentable subject matter doctrine in recent years. Wider appreciation of the range of innovation incentives would help bring patentable subject matter discussions in line with the realities of scientific research, and might even make this doctrinal morass more tractable.

Amy Kapczynski on the Future of "Beyond IP" Scholarship

I was thrilled to participate this past Sunday in the Innovation Law Beyond IP Conference at Yale Law School hosted by the Information Society Project (ISP). The list of attendees included Mark Lemley, Amy Kapczynski, Yochai Benkler, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, John Golden, Hannah Wiseman, Rebecca Eisenberg, Michael Abramowicz, Sean Pager, Jessica Silbey, Pam Samuelson, Barton Beebe, Ian Ayres, Brett Frischmann, Mark McKenna, Bryan Choi, Frank Pasquale, Tal Zarsky, Julie Cohen, Margot Kaminski, Michael Burstein, Bhaven Sampat, Brian Wright, Jonathan Masur, Dan Burk, Liza Vertinsky, Roger Ford, Sean O’Connor, Jim Bessen, Talha Syed, Arti Rai, Orly Lobel, Mario Biagioli, Rochelle Dreyfuss, Ann Bartow, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Nicholson Price, David Grewal, and the ISP's own Jack Balkin.

#BeyondIP Blog Symposium

On Sunday the Yale Law School Information Society Project is hosting our Innovation Law Beyond IP conference, at which I'll be moderating the plenary session and presenting Beyond the Patents-Prizes Debate (coauthored with Daniel Hemel). Participants have been blogging about the conference papers at Balkinization, and you can see my summaries of some of these posts here, here, and here. Here is a list of all the blog posts, organized by conference panel. (I will update this list as more posts are added, including after the conference.)

#BeyondIP Blog Symposium: Burstein & Murray, Masur, Lobel, Pasquale, and Zarsky

Since my prior two updates, we have five new posts in the Innovation Law Beyond IP blog symposium. First, Michael Burstein and Fiona Murray described their new paper on Governing Innovation Prizes. They note that real-world prizes are different from those modeled in the economic literature, and they begin to remedy this empirical gap through a case study of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize.

#BeyondIP Blog Symposium: Golden & Wiseman, Vertinsky, Pager, and Silbey

Following up on my opening post and our first four contributions, we have another four posts in the Innovation Law Beyond IP blog symposium at Balkinization. First, John Golden and Hannah Wiseman describe their paper, The Fracking Revolution: A Case Study in Policy Levers to Promote Innovation, which will be presented in our "Comparing Innovation Policy Levers" along with my paper with Daniel Hemel. Golden and Wiseman's study of public policies behind the fracking boom reveals a "complex backstory [that] features multiple significant roles for government action" including "government-funded R&D, tax and regulatory relief, and a FERC-sanctioned surcharge on interstate gas that financed the private Gas Research Institute." While a case study does not provide "universal truths," it does reaffirm the government's capacity to use a diverse policy mix. "The relatively modest role of patents in the story behind the shale gas boom suggests that, under appropriate circumstances, a mix of alternative policy levers can substitute for the benefits often thought to be supplied by patents."

#BeyondIP Blog Symposium: Hrdy, Bessen, Frischmann & McKenna, and Cohen

Four new posts in the Innovation Law Beyond IP blog symposium at Balkinization! First, Camilla Hrdy describes her paper Local Commercialization Incentives, which she has also blogged about here. In this paper, Hrdy questions whether proposals for "commercialization patents" would actually be preferable to the many "commercialization awards" that national and local governments already provide through direct financing, and she also contributes to the federalism literature by arguing that such awards may be better administered at the local level.