Everyone Out of the Pool!

Paul Kedrosky talks up an interesting new NBER paper on patent pools and their effect on innovation:

Contrary to tragedy of the anti-commons theorizing—the idea that too many people with rights to exclude others from a market will cause less innovation—it seems that, in this case, eliminating market ticket-takers meant that the resulting economic show was worse.

Skepticism of the merits of strong intellectual property protection is on the rise in Washington (there are both ideological and commercial resons for this). This paper shows how our understanding of the link between IP protections and innovation continues to evolve in surprising ways (something that is not surprising to IP scholars such as Will Baumol and others but may be to folks on Capitol Hill and in the White House who believe a weakened IP system is a no-brainer).