Economic structure of intellectual property law

Author: Lands
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: This book is a significant legal economics work by Lands, a leading scholar in the field of legal economics in the United States, focusing on intellectual property law. It systematically organizes and meticulously analyzes the basic systems and specific rules of various fields within intellectual property law. It covers aspects such as copyright law, trademark law, patent law, trade secret law, and the interaction between intellectual property and antitrust. The book provides precise model analyses, combined with rigorous empirical research, offering compelling arguments for policy choices in China and providing researchers with important insights into new research methods. As Chinese academia has yet to conduct systematic and in-depth research on the same issues, this book holds significant academic and practical value.
The book examines the most dynamic areas of contemporary American law from a novel and unique perspective, including copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, publicity rights, and unfair appropriation. Its content is extensive, covering topics ranging from the copyright of private letters to defensive patents for business methods, from moral rights in visual arts to trademark filing practices, from the influence of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Patent Claims to the management of Mickey Mouse. The book explores the history and political economy of intellectual property law, its mathematical challenges, numerous statutes and principles established by judges, and the interaction between intellectual property and antitrust principles—all of which are examined in detail.
The book adopts both empirical and normative approaches. Previous analyses have tended to overlook the paradox that the expansion of intellectual property rights can effectively reduce the quantity of knowledge products by increasing the input costs for creators. These analyses also failed to integrate the various fields of intellectual property law and did not integrate intellectual property law with the law of tangible property, neglecting the many similarities in their economic and legal principles. While the book elaborates on the fundamental economic rationale of intellectual property law, it also endorses a critical belief that the U.S. Congress and courts have gone overboard in creating and protecting intellectual property rights in recent decades.