Consumers constantly confront intellectual property rights (IPRs) every day, from their morning cup of Starbucks coffee to the Intel chip on their computer at work. Intellectual property rights help protect creative inventions in the form of trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Despite legal protection, many goods--including music and video files--are easily copied or shared, which affects industries, innovators, and customers. In his follow-up to one of the most popular PIIE titles of all time, Keith Maskus looks at the expansion of private legal rights into international trade markets, not only for technological items but also for international public goods like vaccines and prescription drugs. Private Rights and Public Problems assesses IPR issues for users, producers, and innovators and the difficulty of establishing an international policy regime that governs IPRs in all markets. Post-industrial countries have preferential terms for licensing and selling products, in part because they develop more global brands and products. Maskus observes that in these countries the primacy of private property raises contentious international debate between innovation owners in rich countries and followers and users in emerging and poor countries. Maskus explores if increased privacy regulations limit innovation and pose artificial and real barriers, such as decreased information accessibility and increased cost. This book addresses a fundamental issue: should basic scientific and technological knowledge be commoditized? In this guide to the current global impact of IPRs, the author analyzes the economic contribution of IPRs underlying features: innovation and access to international technologies.

In the last two decades, accelerating technological progress, increasing economic globalization and the proliferation of international agreements have created new challenges for intellectual property law. In this collection of articles in honor of Professor Joseph Straus, more than 60 scholars and practitioners from the Americas, Asia and Europe provide legal, economic and policy perspectives on these challenges, with a particular focus on the challenges facing the modern patent system. Among the many topics addressed are the rapid development of specific technical fields such as biotechnology, the relationship of exclusive rights and competition, and the application of territorially limited IP laws in cross-border scenarios.

It has become a commonplace that there has been an information revolution, transforming both society and the economy. In 1995 the Trade Related Intellectual Property (TRIPs) agreement aimed to harmonise protection for property in knowledge throughout the global system. This book considers the contemporary disputes about the ownership of knowledge resources - as in the cases of genetically modified foods, the music industry or the internet - and the problematic nature of the TRIPs agreement. In this highly topical book, Christopher May reveals that, because of such problems, at present the balance in intellectual property rights between public good and private reward is more often than not weighted towards the latter.

The fast-evolving relationship between the promotion of welfare-enhancing competition and the balanced protection of intellectual property (IP) rights has attracted the attention of policymakers, analysts and scholars. This interest is inevitable in an environment that lays ever greater emphasis on the management of knowledge and innovation and on mechanisms to ensure that the public derives the expected social and economic benefits from this innovation and the spread of knowledge. This book looks at the positive linkage between IP and competition in jurisdictions around the world, surveying developments and policy issues from an international and comparative perspective. It includes analysis of key doctrinal and policy issues by leading academics and practitioners from around the globe and a cutting-edge survey of related developments across both developed and developing economies. It also situates current policy developments at the national level in the context of multilateral developments, at WIPO, WTO and elsewhere.

The series of papers in this publication were commissioned from renowned international economists from all regions. They review the existing empirical literature on six selected themes relating to the economics of intellectual property, identify the key research questions, point out research gaps and explore possible avenues for future research.

The contributors explore how the rise of international trade and globalization has changed the way trademark law functions in a number of important areas, including protection of well-known marks, parallel imports, enforcement of trademark rights again