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An anticommons is a fragmented allocation of property rights in which resources are prone to underuse because it is costly to assemble necessary permissions to put resources to use. The more rights holders and the more varied their entitlements, the more challenging it is to avoid waste through bargaining. The patent system continuously creates new rights for new claimants, with limited opportunity to establish consensus valuations as technology changes. Patent aggregation might seem like an effective market solution to the problem of fragmented ownership, yet the rise of patent aggregators seems to have done more to reduce costs of assertion by patent owners than to reduce costs of clearing rights by technology users. The result may be a greater risk of underuse as subsequent innovators need to evaluate and clear more rights that they might otherwise have ignored with little risk of assertion in the absence of aggregation

Copyright provides monopoly grants for creators, and these rights have traditionally been protected by a combination of law and technology. Recent technological changes associated with digitization have undermined effective copyright protection by facilitating piracy. At the same time, other aspects of digitization have reduced the cost of bringing new products to market. Despite collapsing revenue to some industries, such as recorded music, the number of new creative products – in music, movies, television, and books - has risen sharply. By many measures, the value of the new products to consumers is also high. Despite the understandable concerns of many in these industries, we are currently experiencing a golden age for new

Does copyright foster the development of creative industries in developing countries? To answer, this chapter explores case studies from Nigeria, India, and China. It argues that copyright’s decentralized, market-driven incentives and allocative efficiencies offer distinct advantages over alternative models such as state patronage and commons-based development. The chapter emphasizes that copyright need not be embraced as an all-or-nothing proposition. Copyright norms can govern some aspects of creative industry operations, while remaining absent in other domains. Thus, high levels of piracy in developing countries are not necessarily incompatible with copyright. As industries develop, however, copyright’s benefits become more salient, and the logic of formalization exerts a gravitational pull. The chapter also examines the interplay between copyright and cultural diversity. It argues that the causal relationships here are complex and ambiguous. It is far from clear, however, that copyright markets are intrinsically hostile to diversity, and copyright’s absence poses its own set of concerns.

Notice of intellectual property content, ownership, boundaries, scope of rights (and limitations), enforcement institutions, and remedial consequences plays a central role in resource planning and other economic and social functions. This chapter examines the function, design, and economic effects of intellectual property notice and disclosure rules and institutions. Based on this analysis, the chapter offers a comprehensive set of policy, institutional, and litigation reforms.

The information revolution has brought demand-side effects to the fore of economic activity, business strategy, and intellectual property jurisprudence and policy. Intellectual property doctrines play a central role in harnessing network effects, promoting innovation to overcome excess inertia, and balancing consumer welfare, competition, and innovation. This chapter surveys and integrates the economic, business strategy, and legal literatures relating to network effects and intellectual property. Section I introduces the topic of network effects and provides an overview of this chapter. Section II describes the functioning of network markets. Section III examines the interplay of business strategy, contract, standard setting organizations, intellectual property, and competition policy. Section IV presents three principles for tailoring intellectual property regimes and competition policy for network technologies. Section V traces the evolution of intellectual property protection for network features of systems and platforms. Section VI discusses the interplay of intellectual property protection and competition policy. Section VII assesses the extent to which intellectual property protection and competition policy align with the normative design principles. Section VIII identifies promising areas for future research.