The Informationist

The Informationist:

Life during the transition from industrial age to information age.

Bruce Abramson

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Promoting Innovation in the Software Field:

A First Principles Approach to Intellectual Property Reform

Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law, 8:1: 75-156, Winter, 2002

This article started life as a paper that I wrote for a 1999 seminar on antitrust and intellectual property, but really came to life only in 2000. The article introduced a fundamental—and somewhat iconoclastic—belief, namely that everything that we learned about software markets during the Microsoft trial was an inevitable consequence of the intellectual property rights that we grant on software.

Though I have subsequently refined this argument elsewhere, this article remains the most formal treatment that I have given it to date. The article itself is split into two parts. The first presents a conceptual model for assessing the relative strength of competing IP regimes, for understanding their relative costs and benefits, and for gravitating towards a societally optimal regime. The second considers the software industry as a case study, and demonstrates the inevitability (and thus the predictability) of Microsoft’s behavior.

I understand that my model has been well received and built upon elsewhere, both in the literature and in classroom exercises.

Read publication here.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 12/18 at 08:40 PM in The Not-Quite-Yet Information Economy