Search Results

Intellectual property enforcement has become a matter of great controversy over the past few decades. Concerns with the private and social costs of enforcing intellectual property rights have instigated intense discussions and a substantial body of literature. This chapter describes the various negative, positive, and distributive effects of costly IP enforcement. It discusses the optimal scope of IP rights in light of enforcement costs and reviews several area-specific enforcement issues in copyright, trademark, and patent law.

This chapter reviews the law and economics literature on intellectual property law and price discrimination. We introduce legal scholars to the wide range of techniques used by intellectual property owners to practice price discrimination; in many cases the link between commercial practice and price discrimination may not be apparent to non-economists. We introduce economists to the many facets of intellectual property law that influence the profitability and practice of price discrimination. The law in this area has complex effects on customer sorting and arbitrage. Intellectual property law offers fertile ground for analysis of policies that facilitate or discourage price discrimination. We conjecture that new technologies are expanding the range of techniques used for price discrimination while inducing new wrinkles in intellectual property law regimes. We anticipate growing commentary on copyright and trademark liability of e-commerce platforms and how that connects to arbitrage and price discrimination. Further, we expect to see increasing discussion of the connection between intellectual property, privacy, and antitrust laws and the incentives to build and use databases and algorithms in support of price discrimination.