Intellectual Property: The Law and Economics Approach

摘要

The traditional focus of economic analysis of intellectual property has been on reconciling incentives for producing such property with concerns about restricting access to it by granting exclusive rights in intellectual goods—that is, by "propertizing" them—thus enabling the owner to charge a price for access that exceeds marginal cost. For example, patentability provides an additional incentive to produce inventions, but requiring that the information in patents be published and that patents expire after a certain time limit the ability of the patentee to restrict access to the invention—and so a balance is struck. Is it an optimal balance? This question, and the broader issue of trading off incentive and access considerations, has proved intractable at the level of abstract analysis.