The Informationist

New Publications

Well, it’s been far too long since I’ve posted anything here. I guess some years the mood hits fairly often, and others it just doesn’t. It’s not like nothing interesting has occurred in the past six months--just that it has all unfolded without my comments. Yet somehow, the world seems to be muddling through. Disturbing. It is entirely possible that it’s not all about me. (Then again, I’m just throwing that out there as a possibility).

Meanwhile though, things have been happening in my own little corner of the universe. In particular, some of my publications have cleared the publication queues, and are now in print:

Publication information is as follows:

The Secret Circuit: The Little-Known Court where the Rules of the Information Age Unfold (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

Intellectual Property and the Alleged Collapsing of Aftermarkets, Rutgers L.J. 38(2) 399-472, 2007.

India’s Journey Towards an Effective Patent System, World Bank Policy Research working paper ; no. WPS 4301.

The Secret Circuit explains what I learned on my year as a law clerk at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In a nutshell, it describes the court’s history as a new institution founded in 1982 to help reorient the American economy away from an industrial/manufacturing base towards an innovation base. It reviews the areas in which the court rules--primarily but not exclusively patents, trade, and government business--and the court’s jurisprudence in those areas. It also assesses the court’s performance. The viewpoint for this assessment? My own, of course: classical Liberalism tempered by the lessons of Conservatism and Socialism. My conclusion? The court has done a great job at its primary assignment, but it’s stuck in the on position. It’s past time for Congress to rethink some aspects of our patent system, and to change its instructions to the court.

Intellectual Property and the Alleged Collapsing of Aftermarkets targets a more specialized readership, as its appearance in a law journal suggests. In particular, this issue of the Rutgers Law Journal is a special issue containing papers from the 2006 conference of the American Antitrust Institute (AAI). The conference itself dealt with the tension between IP and antitrust--or at least its contemporary manifestation. This article outlines my take on the matter, with discussions of both the copyright and patent worlds. In many ways, it represents a more technical legal treatment of material taken from The Secret Circuit, specifically the chapters dealing with patent law’s relationship to copyright and antitrust law.

India’s Journey to an Effective Patent System started as a background paper for the just-released World Bank report, Unleashing India’s Innovation: Towards Sustainable and Inclusive Growth. The Bank took me to India last year to research the needs of the national IP system. Everyone agreed that the longstanding copyright and trademark systems were in decent shape, but the just-overhauled patent laws required significant work. This article describes the inquiries that India must undertake and the work that it must do to progress from a TRIPS-compatible patent law to a functioning patent system.

Now let’s see what I can do in the way of an encore. . .

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 10/02 at 09:33 PM in The Not-Quite-Yet Information Economy